


Care of Magical Creatures

by ungoodpirate



Series: Coursework: a Raven Cycle - Hogwarts AU [3]
Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling, Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, F/M, Gangsey, Gen, Ghost!Noah, Gryffindor!Ronan, Hogwarts AU, M/M, Minor Henry Cheng, Ravenclaw!Gansey, Slow Burn, Slytherin!Adam, Squib!Blue, bluesy - Freeform, not as adam centric as previous installments, pynch - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-04
Updated: 2017-11-25
Packaged: 2018-10-28 02:56:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 12
Words: 49,593
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10822290
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ungoodpirate/pseuds/ungoodpirate
Summary: "That was this group of friends: three wizards, a squib, and a ghost. "When Adam returns to Hogwarts for his sixth year, he didn't expect to make new friends, especially not the mysterious (and mysteriously famous) transfer student Gansey nor slacker Ronan Lynch. Or that he'd end up in a secret tunnel under the Shrieking Shack. Or that he'd be solving the murder of ghost named Noah.AKAAdam Parrish's sixth year at Hogwarts, in which the Gangsey finally gets together.





	1. Adam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam returns to Hogwarts.

After five full years at Hogwarts, having had classes with Gryffindors, Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs, and his fellow Slytherins, Adam knew everyone in his year at least by face and name. So when an unknown boy dressed in a Ravenclaw blue and bronze tie took a seat in his Monday morning Transfiguration class, Adam was befuddled. And not by a Befuddlement Drought, but the old-fashioned, muggle way. 

Once rollcall began, Adam expected the professor to call out the boy for being in the wrong class. Certainly this was a misplaced fifth or seventh year and Adam could be excused for not having a single idea who he was. 

Instead, the professor said, “I’m glad to have you this year, Mr. Gansey.” 

This kid -- Gansey, apparently -- replied, “I’m glad to be here, Professor” complete with a winning grin. Adam had a small urge to knock his teeth out. 

So class progressed as if this new addition was completely normal. The professor was explaining the expectations for a NEWT level course and benefits of studying such a deep, practical side of magic, when the door in the back banged open. In marched Ronan Lynch, no greeting, no excuses, just plopping down on the open stool next to this Gansey person.

“Finally joining us, Mr. Lynch?” the professor said, tone sharp, but that as much admonishment as given. No docked house points, no threatened detention, no punitive essay assignment. Adam understood the complete context of why Lynch was getting a pass for behavior that otherwise would have gotten someone a tongue lashing, at the very least, but he couldn’t stop the bitter resentment that boiled in the back of his throat. 

Adam reached up and touched the tender flesh under his eye. How many times had Adam been suffering and still did what was expected of him?

#

When Adam Parrish returned to his sixth year at Hogwarts, Adam had a bruise under one eye and Ronan Lynch was famous. These two facts had nothing to do with each other, except as witness to how shitty each of their respective summers had went. 

Adam’s summer hadn’t been worse than the summer’s that preceded it. Except for the fact every summer was worse, for every school year at Hogwarts his blood was more and more infected with magic and the promise of the future. Every summer, back at the trailer park, he went into a more and more intense withdraw. 

Ronan Lynch came back to Hogwarts famous because over summer break his father had been murdered. 

Adam knew this because he had read it in the Daily Prophet. He had arranged a system with Blue. He paid for the subscription and had it delivered to her house over break and she mailed it to him the muggle way. He had learned after his third year, when he actually had someone to write over break, that seeing owls coming to and fro the trailer often triggered his father’s temper. This way was better, even if Adam read all his news a week delayed.

Niall Lynch’s death had been front page, headline news -- half voyeuristic shock, half obituary. Apparently Niall had been an interesting character, inventor and adventurer, the delight of dinner parties if any you could get him to follow through on an invitation. Adam hadn’t known any of this until an editorial published in the wake of this tragedy showed up in the leisure section.

Adam read the Daily Prophet front to back. Every section was of interest to him, because every page held details that would help him better understand and integrate into the wizarding world. He scribbled down notes and questions to himself to be checked once he was back at Hogwarts and had access to the library. 

The story of Niall Lynch’s murder was followed by pieces on the investigation and the funeral on various pages in various issues. As Adam read each paper as part of his own extracurricular study, he hadn’t missed a single update. Nor had missed the photograph from the funeral itself, of the mourning family at the graveside. 

Adam stared an inappropriately long time, convincing himself it was just because he was trying to make sure wizarding grieving rituals were the same as muggle ones. Really it was because he could barely recognize the young man he had spent plenty of class time with if never any words. His once curly hair was gone, shaved short. Other than that there was no easy change in him that could pointed out for this dissonance. Maybe it was the betrayal of the camera or maybe it was the set of his shoulders? 

Adam wondered if he himself had changed. Other than height, other than new scars, if someone could compare the looks of him before magic had entered his life and now, would there be some ephemeral nature of him that was different?

#

“Already at the homework, Parrish?” Tad said. He then went out of his ways to knock shoulders with Adam as he took a seat at the Slytherin table in the Great Hall. 

Adam had his advanced Transfiguration textbook set up between two goblets. The length of the reading which had been assigned to be done before next lesson was astronomical, and Adam was sure his other NEWT level classes would follow suit in rigorousness. It being the first day of classes was no excuse for lagging and getting caught behind. 

Adam didn’t respond. One didn’t always need to respond to Tad. He just liked to hear himself talk. 

It was very easy to get Tad going on the talking, and as he was a pureblood who knew and took for granted more about the wizarding world than he could realize, sometimes letting him talk lead to Adam’s advantage. 

So when Adam did end up responding, it wasn’t about his study habits. 

“Where’d this Gansey person come from?” he said.

Tad scoffed. He scooped a large portion of food onto his plate. He would leave about half of it uneaten, a kind of wastefulness that put Adam on edge every mealtime. 

“You don’t know who Dick Gansey is?”

Again, Adam didn’t need to respond.

Tad elbowed Joshua, where he sat on Tad’s other side. “Hey, Parrish doesn’t know who Dick Gansey is.”

“Merlin, Parrish, pathetic.”

Adam repressed a sigh. This whole thing was really his own fault. 

“Why don’t you ask your girlfriend,” someone added, with a teasing lilt. 

Adam turned the page of his textbook and let his classmates distract themselves with laughter and jibs. Blue wasn’t his girlfriend. The only time they had been close had been back in third year when they had shared a single kiss and a minor flirtation. After that they had fell and followed solidly in the path of friendship and it worked for them. Adam had never had a friend like her before; he never had nothing like her before, someone to rely on. 

Asking Blue, however, wasn’t a bad idea. He owed her a letter anyway. 

#

This Gansey person made an appearance again in the double Potions session after lunch. Where he shook the professor’s hand and introduced himself. Adam squinted, watching the entire thing go down. 

He introduced himself. A returning student of their year would have no need for introductions. 

#

Dear Adam,

It’s so frustrating every school year when you get back and you’re so close but I don’t get to see you until the first Hogsmeade weekend. Ugh. Not fair. We should get Persephone to do something about this. 

Anyway, everyone is fine here. Except Orla. She’s annoying as hell. Now that’s graduated, not only is she around all the time, she acts all superior because she’s a full blown witch. I’m ready to take her wand and stick it up her… well, you can imagine. 

To answer your questions… Yes, I heard about that Lynch guy’s death. No, I don’t who this Gansey person is. His name does sound vaguely familiar, though. I’ll ask Mom. She’s with customers all day, or I would ask now. You could ask Persephone. You have better access to her up the castle during the week than I do. I’ll let you know if I find anything out. 

Don’t study too hard. 

-Blue

PS - That last part is a joke because I know you will.

 

#

“Scrying is the method in which we divine messages and visions, the crystal ball is a just a tool, the medium through which we receive them,” Persephone said from the front of the class. It was hard to call what she was doing -- speaking in her soft, peculiar voice -- a lecture. “One can scry through many mediums, but the crystal ball, traceable back to the Celtic druids, has a special place in the clairvoyant arts, and any divination education without it would be incomplete.”

Adam raised a hand and was given a nod to speak: “I heard somewhere that scrying is dangerous.”

There were only three people in the NEWT-level Divination class, most having dropped it after the OWL exams, with the the allure having worn off after years of trying to divine and failing. Also, Persephone didn’t go light on assigning essays. Adam, frankly, surprised that their class was this big: him, a Hufflepuff girl who seemed to be purely into it for the aesthetic, and a Ravenclaw girl who always seemed like she didn’t believe a single prediction that came out the class. 

Because all four Houses were condensed into combined classes at the NEWT level, this mysterious Gansey person kept popping up in the same places Adam was. Thankfully, this didn’t include Divination. Gansey’s personality (or what Adam had observed of it) and Persephone’s didn’t seem possible to exist in the same place. The same way Adam had a hard time imagining his mother existing in the world of magic. Gansey, polite and primed, didn’t belong in the world of Persephone’s tower classroom. 

“It can be,” Persephone answered. “When you’re scrying, you are opening up your mind. You risk your mind getting too far away from you, or for something to get in that you don’t want.”

The Ravenclaw girl coughed in a skeptical way. 

Persephone raised her wand and gave it a flick. The lights lowered so that the room was only illuminated by the afternoon sun streaming through the window creating all manner of streaks of light and long shadows. “Now, we’ll start with some breathing exercises so we can practice our concentration.”

Adam breathed. 

The Slytherin head had tried to convince Adam to drop Divination. Adam had come into the school year with a plan to pursue every NEWT-level course his OWLs would qualify him for… which was all of them. Adam had received E’s and O’s in all his OWL exams last year, a letter that was worth the anger it ired up in his father by the delivery owl pecking at the window at 7 in the morning. Adam’s full course load ambition had been quelled down by the advice of his Head of House, who warned that it was ill-advised, unprecedented, and probably impossible. Eyes set on something sustainable, salaried, with plenty of growing room at the Ministry of Magic, he’d dropped Ancient Runes, Care of Magical Creatures, and Astrology, and kept Divination on instead. 

After class, Adam took extra long packing his backpack, especially considering they hadn’t even gotten out their textbooks that class, as he waited for the girls to be long gone. 

“Ask what your thinking,” Persephone said, about second before Adam was going to clear his throat to start. 

Adam played with the clasp on his bag. It was a cheap metal, once plated to look chrome, but now that worn away to reveal the dull gray underneath. “We have a new student,” Adam said. 

“We have new students every year,” Persephone replied. She hadn’t raised the lights again, so her face was catch in shadow, except for the light that glinted off her glasses’ lenses. It made it look like she had shining eyes like an animals out in the nighttime, but in reality it was a mask hiding all telling expression. 

“We have a new sixth year student,” Adam said. “That doesn’t happen every year.” 

“No it doesn’t,” Persephone said. “Some people get special treatment.” 

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“Ask your cards,” Persephone said in a tone that was the closest she ever sounded to commanding. “Or ask Gansey.”

Adam left the Divination classroom feeling befuddled like back in third year when he first met Persephone. She only spoke straight forward in bits and pieces, the rest of the time residing on hints and riddles. She wanted you to figure out things for yourself, thought there was more power in it. 

But for Adam, Gansey was an oddity, a curiosity, not a destiny. And if Adam couldn’t get a quick answer from one of his usual sources, it wasn’t worth his time and energy to do more. He had his classes, and thus the entire swell of his future, to spend his attention on. 

So life and school went on those first few weeks. Gansey’s schedule overlapped Adam’s a great deal, but not completely. Adam had even a less overlapping schedule with Ronan, but his appearances in classes were sporadic and the professors’ patience with him grew thinner each passing day. 

What Adam did learn about Gansey without trying was that Gansey was popular, that he had a polished smile, and that people of all houses called out his name in the corridors to get his acknowledgement. He was significant enough to be known and acquire sycophants at an alarming rate. “With a family like his…” Adam overheard a swooning girl say in the Great Hall, and it all came clear without any secret needing to be spelled out. What made Gansey special was money and prestige. 

It was the way of the wizarding world, very much like the muggle world outside of it. There were a few brilliants who worked their way up, but most of the important people were born lucky. Gansey, like a toxic mirror, just reinforced what Adam already knew, what Adam was already reminded of every day. That Adam had been born as unlucky and as common as dirt, but Adam Parrish wasn’t going to let luck stop him. 

#

 

On Friday afternoons Adam had a favorite table in the library where it was mouse quiet. No one but him did studying on a normal Friday afternoon. Sunday afternoons, yes, in the rush to get everything done for classes on Monday. Friday afternoons before exams, yes, but those weren’t normal Fridays. Every other day of the week, maybe, it trickled depending on assignments and due dates. 

Friday afternoons in the library were Adam’s perfect privacy as the rest of the school would be restless with newly born weekend freed: in the common room, out on the lawn, in the Great Hall, and in the corridors in between.

So Adam Parrish found his table, spread out his books and parchment with no care that anyone else might need the space. As he settled in for a solid few hours of work, voices drifted through the stacks from a few bookshelves down. Familiar voices. 

“I can’t find it here… Is this even the history section?” This was Gansey, Adam believed, for he raised his hand and answered enough questions in class for it to become familiar already.

“I don’t fucking know.” That could only be Ronan Lynch. Adam had seen them sitting together in classes and even together in the corridors. Neither seemed like a friend the other would want. 

“You don’t know? How long have you gone to this school?”

“What part of ‘I don’t fucking know’ do you not understand?”

Adam glanced toward Madam Pince, sitting at desk near the doors into the library, an ever vigilant guard of her precious tomes. She was one of those librarians who cared more about the wellbeing of her books than about people using them. She didn’t care for students in her library and she was intimidating to ask for help. Adam thought he might of come one of her favorites, or at least one of her least hated, over his constant years of coming here and never breaking the rules about loudness, food, or mess once. She didn’t glare at him quite so viciously as other students upon entering. 

With a sigh, Adam stood and followed the voices to their source. The faster they found their book, the faster they would leave, the faster Adam’s private time could continue as planned. 

He poked his head around the bookcase. 

Ronan was sitting on the windowsill, head leaned back against the glass as he stared indeterminately up at the ceiling. The heal of one foot was propped up on a low shelf, putting dirty treads of worn shoes very close to the spines of some very precious books, a vision that would’ve given Madam Pince a minor heartache or the necessary inspiration to perform an Unforgivable curse. 

Gansey, in stark opposition of his companion, was studiously going down the shelves, squinting at titled spines, trying to read was what worn away or in archaic forms of English. 

Adam cleared his throat. Both boys turned to look at him: Ronan with a lazy dip of the head, but Gansey with something a little more startled. It was the first time Adam had witnessed this posh young man anywhere near the area of uncomposed. 

“The history section is actually over in that corner,” Adam said, with a demonstrated point. “That is if you're looking for history-history. If you looking for the history of a spell or something, that’s in the magical theory section. Over there.” Another point. 

Gansey straightened up. “It’s history-history,” he said.

And that’s how Adam ended up helping Gansey find his the book he was seeking, Ronan following behind like a shadow. 

Grinning down at the book now found in his hands, Gansey said, “So, Adam, you’re a library expert?”

Adam shifted the weight between his feet. “I spend a lot of time in here.”

Gansey glanced up. “What do you know about Welsh kings?”

#

Saturday morning, when Gansey approached Adam at Slytherin’s table in the Great Hall and said -- “Ronan and I are stealing some muffins and are going to eat breakfast out on the lawn. Want to join us?” -- Adam almost said no. After all, helping someone find a book and then listening to their monologue on their weird obsession were hardly the dependable makings of a friendship. If Adam could be one to judge what were the makings of a friendship. And those things -- the finding and the listening -- had been performed as a means to an ends, to get the intruders out of his study space. 

However, seeing Tad and some of his other classmates gawking, with confusion, with horror, with longing, seeing that Gansey was talking to Adam out of all them, making this offer to the least worthy of them… Adam couldn’t resist. He could spare breakfast time. He could spare more than breakfast time. After getting Gansey and Ronan to vacate the library, Adam had worked well into the evening and plowed successfully through most of his homework. 

Ronan was skulking in the Great Hall doorway, awaiting them, as Adam followed Gansey out. They ended up seated amongst the roots of an ancient tree on the edge of the lake. 

“Ronan was telling me about the Giant Squid,” Gansey said conversationally, after a stretch of them all devouring muffins from the sizable collection they had accrued by stuffing their pockets and stacking them in their arms and walking out like they were completely allowed. 

Back to the trunk of the tree, Ronan scoffed. “If you mean I told you it fucking existed.”

“There’s supposed to be merpeople down there too,” Adam said. 

“Really?” Gansey said, with genuine interest. “That’s not in Hogwarts, A History.” 

“That book has a bunch of glaring oversights,” Adam replied. 

Ronan groaned, loudly, dramatically. “Why are you two such nerds? I’m about throw myself to the giant squid.” 

“The squid will throw you right back out,” Adam countered. 

Gansey snorted. “Yeah. No polluting the lake, Lynch.”

So the morning went, fading into the noon and past it, just a couple boys throwing jibs at each other, Gansey asking probing questions about other mysteries of Hogwarts left out of the books, and lapses of comfortable silence. And for some stretch of minutes, even, Adam was able to sit there without thinking about all the other things he could be or should be doing. It was like he was his whole self, not past or future, just purely present, for a little while. 

That evening, Adam wrote to Blue: I think I accidently made some friends.

#

Blue had started a new job this year, waiting tables at the Three Broomsticks. It was highlight in her letters, sometimes complaints, sometimes outlandish stories about patrons, always tempered by the sentiment: Good tips though. 

She, like Adam, was a collector of odd jobs, seekers of entrepreneurial satisfaction. Although money was a motivating factor for both of them, Adam couldn’t help but figure Blue had another motive. With her jobs she was collecting experiences, personalities, identities, connections, so that maybe if she surrounded herself with enough of them she wouldn’t feel so out of place. 

Adam hadn’t told her this, his estimation of her. He was fairly certain she wouldn’t appreciate it. 

Blue had a shift at the Three Broomsticks the afternoon of the Hogsmeade visitation day, but the morning was just the two of them, on the porch of her eggshell blue house, catching up. 

“So when am I going to meet this mysterious Gansey person?” she said. “I never did get around to asking my mom about him.”

Gansey was spending the morning touring the town as this was his first visit. They planned to meet up at the Three Broomsticks later, during Blue’s shift. Adam relayed this plan to her. And added, “Don’t bother asking your mom about Gansey. If her response is anything like Persephone’s, it will be vague and knowing and pointed.”

“Damn,” Blue said. “They’ve had time to conspire by now… How’s your divination stuff going, by the way?” 

Adam made a little noise in the back of his throat and rubbed a hand over his hair. “This whole scrying thing… I’m not getting it. We’ve been at it for weeks in class, and still… I mean, not every seer can do every type of divination, right?” He was asking or Blue’s expert opinion, having lived with an entire species of seers for her whole life. 

Blue just sort of shrugged. Perhaps it was the wrong question to ask. 

“So Gansey,” Adam said, because he didn’t like the long silence. “Just fair warning, he’s kind of obsessed with this Glendower person.”

Blue snorted. “Glendower? That’s like Quibbler stuff.” 

“Quibbler?”

“The Quibbler? Oh, it’s this like trash magazine full of conspiracy theories and stuff. You should totally read it. It’s a riot.” 

Adam walked with Blue to the Three Broomsticks when it as time for her shift. When they reached the pub and pushed through the door, the place was teaming with Hogwarts robes, uniformly black and crested on the right lapel. Blue sighed, aggressively. Hogwarts students en masse were her biggest annoyance. 

He took a seat and nursed a single butterbeer -- he couldn’t justify splurging on more than one a Hogsmeade visit -- as he waited for Gansey and Ronan to join him. It felt strange and worrisome, anticipating introducing his friendship with Blue, something years old now, to this newly founded thing with Gansey. Whatever connection he had with Ronan, Adam wasn’t ready to exactly call it friendship. At this point, they only ever shared the same approximate space because Gansey was there like summoning spell, pulling disparate parts together.

In preparation of this Hogsmeade visit, when Adam had mentioned the meeting of these two different friendships, Gansey had graciously agreed. Ronan, who hadn’t seemed like he had been paying attention, piped up to say, “Are you talking about that mouthy squib girl?” because apparently Blue had a reputation that preceded her. Adam, after all, hadn’t been the only one to witness her dumping a drink over someone’s heads. As Hogwarts rumors went, it had spread fast and in inaccuracy. His and Blue’s favorite variation is the one where she flipped a table. 

When Gansey and Ronan did arrive, joined Adam at his table, met Blue when she came over to take their order and say hello… it didn’t go well. 

Ronan was abrasive as always, but Adam had warned Blue about him, because Ronan was the type of person that needed to come with a warning label. Gansey, however, had a different way of putting his foot in his mouth all in the attempts of his usual brand of charming. It worked fine on adults and other young people like him, who had been brought up rich and posh. But a comment about the service that was supposed to come off as a light-hearted joke but really overlooked the realities of someone having to work for their money, and Blue a person with a very short bullshit tolerance most days and would probably had even less this day… It didn’t go well. 

Walking up the dirt path back to Hogwarts, Gansey said, “I’m sorry I offended your girlfriend.”

“She’s not my girlfriend,” Adam said, a routine phrase by now. 

“She’s not?” But it wasn’t Gansey who asked this with immediacy. It was Ronan. 

“What?” Adam challenged. Ronan was a person who just asked to be challenged; he didn’t seem to operate with any other realm of human interaction. “You interested?” There was something about Blue’s and Ronan’s caustic natures that was matching if not complimentary. 

Ronan looked away from Adam, then back at Adam, then away again. “No.”


	2. Blue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that her true love would die before the two of them would meet.

Blue returned home that evening with an exhaustion that crossed her shoulders and stretched down all the way to her toes. It was the busiest day she had ever worked in the Three Broomsticks. 

“How was it?” Maura called from the kitchen when Blue tromped in the front door. Mom lounged in one of the kitchen chairs, holding a goblet in a lazy way that convinced Blue there had been something alcoholic in it. 

“Hogwarts students are terrible tippers,” Blue said in a grumble. She dropped down in a chair across from her mother and leaned over to unlace her boots. 

“The outrage,” Maura said, lifting the goblet as if in a little salute. “My customer cancelled, so I’ve been filling my afternoon in other ways.”

“I can see that.” Laces loosed, Blue tugged off her boots one by one. Freed, her feet already started to feel better. 

“How’s Adam? I didn’t see him.”

“He’s good,” Blue said, keeping what he told her about his struggle with scrying in confidence. If he wanted the advice or intervention of the seers in this house, he was free to approach them himself. “He’s actually been making some new friends at school.”

“About time,” Maura said, and there was something about something in the way she said it. A seer something. 

Blue decided to go for it. “One of this friends is the guy named Gansey. Do you anything about him?”

Maura hmm-ed, which was an indirect yes.

“So you do know him.”

“I’m not going to lie to you, Blue.” 

“In a seer way?”

“In a current events way,” Maura answered, which didn’t mean not in a seer way. 

“Will you tell me the current events way?” Blue said. She curled her toes and them flexed them straight, working out the cramps. 

Maura took a sip from her goblet. 

“Really?” Blue said. 

“Sometimes it’s better not to know too much.”

“Sometimes it’s …” Blue repeated with a shake of her head. “You realize what you do for a profession, right?”

“So I would be the expert on knowing too much, wouldn’t I?”

Blue stood with an unsuppressed groan as she reapplied her weight back onto her feet. “I’m going to my room.”

“I’ll call you for dinner!” Maura shouted after her. 

 

#

 

Blue Sargent had forgotten how many times she’d been told that her true love would die before the two of them would meet. 

It was a very devastating prediction to give to a young girl, for young girls were fed on fairy tales and to understand ‘true love’ as something factual. 

There was a time, a little older, that Blue took the prediction metaphorically, right around the time when any hope that she wasn’t actually a squib was squashed by the un-arrival of her Hogwarts letter. In this interpretation true love was magic and it was dead to Blue by being something she couldn’t reach out and grasp hold of. 

As she grew even older, she grew out of this belief. It was true that magic was a frustrating world she had been simultaneously born into and then locked out of. Magic was a pathway to intrigue and adventure, but it wasn’t -- the more she learned the more she grew up -- the only one. So she could lust over magic, but she couldn’t never truly love it. It was, after all, never hers. 

It was this breathtaking piece of logic that lead her to her next revelation. If her true love, whoever this person was, died before she met them, how could it be love? How could it be love lost? 

It was the same as the mysterious absence of her father. She could be curious -- was curious -- but how could one miss what they didn’t know. 

#

Hogsmeade was a small town, but it still felt very crowded. Blue believed this was due to the nature of its smallness, in which the wizarding world was already community tigher knit that the muggle, and this town a tighter, microcosm of it. In other words, everybody knew everybody, and everybody knew everybody’s business. 

This meant Blue was known. Both as what she was and what she wasn’t. What she was: a product of the strangest household/business in town, and this was a town that included the Hog’s Head Pub. What she wasn’t: magic. The squib. The squid girl. It might as well been her second name. 

If Hogsmeade was crowded, even more so was her house. Too many people crammed into too few spaces. Even with her own room, with the door shut, Blue could still hear people all around: chatting in the hall, feet coming up and down the creaky stairs, the front door opening and shutting as customers were welcomed in and escorted out for readings. It didn’t feel like privacy when any number of people could knock on her door at any moment to ask her any number of questions or for any number of favors. 

So on certain days, when Blue felt a special need to be alone in true privacy, she could hike herself up to hill where the Shrieking Shack sat squat and derelict to tuck herself against the trunk of one of the trees and partake in whatever task she sought privacy for. Most of the town folks treated the shack with a wary reverence, and when Hogwarts students weren’t in town to gawk at it, this hill was empty. 

The day after the first Hogwarts weekend -- with its hoard of Hogwarts students demanding a lot and tipping poorly, with Gansey, with Maura being elusive about Gansey -- Blue craved this privacy. Today she had brought with her a well-thumbed copy of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them. She was deep into the first chapter when the sound of footsteps crunching through the underbrush disturbed her. 

Blue marked her place in her book and looked to see who it was. For some odd reason she believed it would be someone from her house, calling her back for this, that, or the other. She was wrong. For the person who appeared over the dome of the hill was none other than Gansey. 

Seeing her, he startled into a stop. He then raised a hand and called out, “Hello.”

Blue glared. 

“I hope I didn’t disturb you,” he said, walking closer although Blue was clearly very disturbed. She got to her feet. Although she was shorter than almost all of her peers, she didn’t need to give her anyone, let alone Gansey, any more height advantage over her than necessary. 

“You know Hogsmeade weekends are actually only for Saturdays,” Blue said.

“I got special permission to come into town,” he said. 

“Special permission,” Blue repeated back, hating him from his square jaw to his neatly parted hair. She was glad to spy dirt along the hem of his otherwise pristine robes. 

He tilted his head, and only belatedly did Blue realize he was reading the title of her book. 

He pointed at it. “You like magical creatures?”

“I like the idea of seeing them,” Blue replied then instantly felt like she was revealing too much. 

That was another quirk of being a squib. Unlike most muggles, you could believe in magic, see it, explore it, just not do it. Blue would never be repelled by a muggle repelling charm, but in equal measures she neither would she ever be accepted into Hogwarts for a magical education, an essential for all magical careers. 

“Ah,” Gansey said. It sounded obnoxiously polite, a feigned interested. “I hear the Forbidden Forest is good for that.”

“Yes, and it’s also forbidden.” 

“That stops you?” Gansey said. 

Blue opened her mouth for a rebuttle, but she had none. It had stopped her. 

“What’re you doing here?” she said instead, because why not be on the offense. 

“I already said, I got special --” 

 

“And why did you get special permission?” Sure Hogsmeade was the only all-wizard town in the country, but having lived their all her life, Blue could confirm it wasn’t all that riveting. 

Gansey extended an arm in a wave towards the Shrieking Shack. 

“You came to see the Shrieking Shack? Well, now you’ve seen it and you can go now.” 

“I was actually hoping to take a closer look,” he said. With the way his eyes lightened over to the Shrieking Shack in a way no one had probably looked at it before, Blue understood. 

“You can’t,” she said. “It’s -- It’s haunted.” Except that Blue lived in a house full of psychics and knew for the fact that rumor was definitely false. 

“I know,” Gansey said with absolute joy, nothing like the students who would dare each other to climb the fence and creep close, only to run away before reaching it. Then, he asked something she didn’t expect: “Do you care to join me?” 

The ‘no’ was on the tip of her tongue, but then she looked past Gansey to the shack, thumbprint-sized on the hill. A shack that she had always known wasn’t haunted, had lived beside her entire life, that she had never gone nearer to than the fence. She squeezed her book between her fingers. She could sit here and read about adventures and discovery, or she could partake in one. 

She tucked the book into her beaded satchel bag. “I do care to join you,” she said, affecting a tone that was an over-exaggeration of Gansey’s posh ask. 

Something shifted in Gansey’s expression, his polite mask twitching. Maybe he hadn’t expected her to mock him. Maybe he hadn’t expected her to say yes. “Shall I lead the way, or should you?” 

Blue scoffed and marched right past him. 

Down the far length of the fence was a low spot, easily climbed over. Blue went first, then glared, watched Gansey follow after, have to tug free the sleeve of his robe from a nail. 

“Close enough?” Blue challenged. Part of her was sure this prim boy would give in and turn back at the first threat of a hang nail. On the other hand, he was the one who had started all this and gave no attention to his snagged sleeve.

“Onward,” he said. 

Lop-sided and rundown, up close the Shrieking Shack lost all of it’s aurora. It did not seem haunted or otherwise eerie. It just seemed old. When Blue reached out and pressed her fingers to one of the shingles of siding, it fell loose as soon as she released the pressure. 

“Destruction of property,” Gansey muttered behind her in a way that might’ve been him joking. 

“So…?” she asked, after they had circled all four sides, which wasn’t a very long walk through overgrown grass. 

Gansey scratched his chin as he peered up at the slanted roof. “I wonder if there’s a way in.”

“That’s breaking and entering,” Blue said. 

“I have joined you in your life of crime,” he replied. 

Blue opened her mouth and then shut it. A long tendril of grass tickled her leg. ‘Stop bantering with me,’ she thought. 

Gansey went to the front door and tried the handle. It was, predictably, locked. He drew his wand out of his pocket. It was an ashy-brown thing, a stick whittled into a perfectly round, straight shape, all personality of the tree it came from striped away. 

“Alohomora,” he tried, but the lock was made of sterner stuff than that. Blue was secretly pleased to see magic not succeed. She was less pleased at the disappointed furrow on Gansey’s forehead. She was even less pleased to realize she was so tuned into his feelings, but perhaps she was truly just tuned into the adventure itself. 

“Let’s try the windows,” Blue suggested. 

Whatever magic had been used to the door had not been extended to the boarded over windows, or had long worn away. The boards nailed over the windows where in the same state of disrepair as the siding and consequently, easily removed with a little muscle applied. 

Gansey lit the tip of his wand alight with a whispered “Lumos” and they both leaned over the windowsill to see a dusty, cobwebbed, gray kitchen. 

“It doesn’t look like much,” Gansey said. 

“You’re not giving up now, are you?” Blue challenged. 

Gansey just grinned. “Course not.” 

Blue even took Gansey’s offered hand to help her climb through the window. 

Inside, the shack didn’t improve much in splendor or intrigue. The floor creaked under each step.

Blue eyed the table, leaning slanted onto the floor from missing a leg. Gansey already stood at the doorway to the next room, wand held aloft. 

“So…” he said, glancing over at her. The light from his wand cast his features in sharp relief. “Adam and you dated?”

And here they had been having a pleasant time.

“No,” Blue said, worn to this worn inquiry. “Adam and I did not date.”

“Oh,” he said, looking back down the hall. “It’s just the impression I got.” 

“From who? From Adam?” Blue stepped forward. 

“Not from Adam. Just from… around.” 

“From rumors,” she said. 

“One could say that,” Gansey replied carefully in a way that was too many words for saying ‘yes.’ 

Blue leaned her hip against the wall. “Adam and I didn’t date. We had a… flirtation. When we were kids.” Not that thirteen was exactly kids. Not that thirteen was that many years ago. “He was the first guy I met who wasn’t a complete asshat.”

“Asshat?”

“It’s a technical term.” 

Gansey smiled. Not like his previous smiles, which looked like they had been cast in bronze and polished. This was an absent smile. A smile he probably didn’t realize he was smiling. 

Something in her chest clenched in a way that was out-of-practice, but she recognized. She took a big breathe to try and ease it away. 

“So are we adventuring or not?” she said, brushing past him, her shoulder banging into his on the way through the doorway. But she couldn’t get very far beyond the reach of Gansey’s Lumos spell. She sighed, and hated it. It’s not that she needed Gansey or even magic; she just needed light. “Come on,” she said, and heard Gansey moving behind her. 

A few steps later, she stubbed her toe along something on the floor. A crooked floor board. No, she saw when she looked down. It was something else entirely. 

“Is that trapdoor?” Gansey said, just behind her shoulder. 

“Sure looks like it,” Blue said, staring down at the hatch, at the handle she had stubbed her toe.

“Here.” Gansey passed off his wand to Blue. It stayed lit even as Blue fumbled with it. She had never just been handed one before. He leaned down, wrapped his fingers around the handle and gave a great heave. It opened with a rusty crank of a noise. 

Below was a drop and what looked like a tunnel. Their exploration had turned from a crummy old house to an actual discovery. 

“Next Hogsmeade weekend,” Gansey said. “We should all go down it. Figure out where it goes.” 

“That sounds safe,” Blue said, in a way that wasn’t a no, in a way that sort of sounded like ‘That sounds like an adventure.’ 

They crept around the rest of the shack, up the stairs, into the bedrooms, finding a disturbing amount of destroyed furniture and claw marks and not any ghosts at all.

“For the most haunted place in the county, I don’t think this place is haunted at all.”

“It isn’t,” Blue said. Gansey took it as an agreement rather than her stating a revealing fact. 

“I’m a little disappointed,” Gansey said mildly, like the team he rooted for lost a game. 

Blue raised an eyebrow. “You wanted it to be haunted?” 

Gansey said nothing, didn’t defer, didn’t smile or laugh. He shrug a single shoulder in a way that might’ve been completely a muscle memory reaction. 

When they went back outside the shack, judged from the angle of the sweeping sun, more time had passed than either of them had realized. 

“I have to get back to the castle,” Gansey said. “I was only supposed to be in town for….” 

“Not this,” Blue said, feeling an odd fondness now that she had learned that Gansey had to bend the rules to get here, that it wasn’t all just ‘special permission.’ 

At the top of the hill where they had crossed paths, Gansey said, “Well, what a prosperous day.”

Blue scoffed. “Don’t ruin it.”

#

“Blue, when are you going to start dating Adam for real?”

Blue raised her eyes from her lumpy knitting project. It had started as with the ambitions of being a sock, but the cerulean tube might have to repurposed into an arm warmer. 

“What was that now?” she said. 

“Adam,” Orla repeated with renewed emphasis. “He’s good-looking. He’s smart. He’s obliviously going somewhere with life with all that studying. He gets along with our strange family…”

“Well, when you put it like that,” Blue said. “Why don’t you date him?”

“He cute, sure,” Orla said, kicking up a foot onto the coffee table that sat squat between them, both now perched on opposite facing couches. “But you two like each other.”

“We’re friends. Friends generally do.” Blue looked down at her yarn and needles, her stitch count had fluttered far out of her head since the start of this ridiculous conversation.

“And you don’t exactly have many of those, do you?”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean, you don’t like many people,” Orla said with a little wave of the wrist as if she could just wave this insult away. “And you don’t easy make it easy for people to like you.”

“Again,” Blue said, with a higher pitched tone of offense, “Excuse me?”

“But in a few years time,” Orla plowed on. “Once he’s graduated and off living his life his somewhere else, you are going to wish you nailed him down.”

Blue leaned back on her seat to get a full vision of Oral sitting across from her, long-limbed and casually sprawled like this was seriously something she could say in a relaxed position. 

“Are you -- are you seriously talking to me about my prospects right now? 

“Blue,” Orla said, like the little bit of age she had on her was magnificently insightful and significant. 

“What you’re saying is offensive on so many levels. My life as a woman is not about nailing down some man --”

 

“Blue,” Orla said again, louder. “I’m trying to help you.”

“Why? Because I’m so unwantable as a squib that I better date the first wizard that can stand my presence? Is that it?” 

Orla mouth formed a tight line, like she had just swallowed a bone. Her moment of silence confirmed that this was exactly what she meant. 

“We both live in the same world,” Orla said. 

“Don’t blame the world for the things you’re saying,” Blue replied. A wayward spring poked her back as she shifted to discard what was now a tangle of yarn. 

Orla had dropped her foot from the coffee table, sitting more rigid now, as the argument grew more serious. Tiny specks of dust danced in the air, visible by the stack sunlight slanting through the window. 

“You’re going to miss him, once he leaves Hogwarts.”

Blue knew she would miss him, but she only ever got him in bits and pieces now. However, she wouldn’t try and make him fall in love with her in order to keep him. Adam, like Blue, had dreams bigger than what they were born for. Adam, of the two of them, had the means to make them happen. 

As a last insult, Orla added, “It’s not like you’re waiting for your true love anyway.” 

Blue couldn’t say anything for a full five seconds. She then stood, said a pretty vicious swear combination to Orla, then locked herself in her bedroom.


	3. Ronan

“Are you least going to pretend to do the Transfiguration essay?” Gansey asked. 

The three of them -- Adam, Gansey, and Ronan -- were gathered around a library table. Adam and Gansey had scrolls of parchment unfurled, books open, quills scribbling. Ronan had his feet propped up on the chair across from him and was busy keeping a piece of lint in the air with his wand. 

“If I’m not going to it, why would I waste my time pretending to do it?” Ronan countered. 

“You disgust me,” Adam said, not even lifting his head. Not even pausing his quill in his deliberate scrawl. 

“You disgust me,” Ronan repeated in a high-pitched, nasally tone. He flicked his wand and the lint transfigured into a feather in a shade of iridescent silver unlike anything found from any bird in existence. The feather drifted down and landed like a kiss on the table top. 

Gansey plucked it up with a nimble pinch, held it up to the light. “It’s stunning,” he said.

“You didn’t say an incantation,” Adam said. 

“You don’t need to, if you know what you’re doing,” Ronan replied. 

“I know what wordless magic is,” Adam snapped, then weary, an inkblot forming on his parchment under the still tip of his quill, “I didn’t know anyone our age could do it.”

“What spell were you thinking of, Ronan?” Gansey said in that mediating tone of his, laying the feather with care back on the table. 

Ronan jabbed his wand at the feather and it crumbled back into lint. 

“Look it up,” he growled. He stood up roughly from his chair, the legs screeching against the stone floor. It rocked, dangerously, threatening to topple over, but didn’t. From the desk at the front Madam Pince made a sound like an angry cat. 

Ronan stormed off, leaving his two friends behind, confused in his shadows on whatever set him off this time.

....

Ronan Lynch was a very talented individual. 

Ronan Lynch was good, and daring, at flying. Taking turns and diving, flying at recklessly fast speeds. The broomstick might as well been another arm, a set of wings, his own heartbeat, the spark of magic in his veins. He had the type of talent that would be the makings of a great chaser (like his father and older brother had been), or even a seeker, if hadn’t too greatly enjoyed whacking bludgers at his competitors. That is, back when he was still on the Gryffindor Quidditch team. To the panic of Team Captain, Seventh Year Evanna Wood, Ronan Lynch had arrived at Hogwarts this year and announced he was quitting by just not showing up to practice.

Ronan Lynch was good at magic. Niall Lynch had been a powerful, inventive wizard and he had passed down that trait to his three sons. So what Ronan lacked in studiousness, he made up for in raw talent. 

Ronan Lynch was also very good at keeping secrets. 

The secret he was keeping -- the secret he was engaging in -- right now was the tower. 

Not the astronomy tower, which was too often occupied with classes and otherwise tainted by students trying to have a romantic rendezvous. No. The east tower, which was one of the many other towers in Hogwarts castle, one that no one else seemed to bother with. 

Looking over the railing of the balcony, the tower pitched straight down into the rocks, which tumbled themselves into the edge of the lake. It was dangerous view. 

“Are you going to jump?” 

Ronan cast his eyes to the source of the voice: a pale, see-through form of a boy. A ghost of a boy.

“No, Noah,” Ronan said with sneer. Turning to put his back to the view, he leaned his elbows against the railing to prop himself up. It was November and the wind was biting cold. 

This was the other secret of the tower, other than the fact that Ronan liked to venture here to clear his head and think how awesome a broomstick ride from this height would be, how adrenaline-pumping a dive would be, a wronski feint pulled off right over the surface of the water.

Other Hogwarts’s ghosts wandered the castle freely, like Nearly Headless Nick, or kept around certain corners but could pop up elsewhere when the fancy overcame them, like Moan Myrtle. Noah never left the tower. 

Ronan had first met him third year, when he was exploring after hours. He had always been a mischievous student with a hardy number of detentions to his name. He was adventurous. He was reckless. He was Gryffindor-bold through and through. The secret was Noah. Noah, the same age of roughly sixteen every passing year, as Ronan got taller and taller. Noah, in his school robes, a student when he died. 

Ronan said now, “Is that how you died?” 

Noah’s eyes narrowed, or maybe they did. His eyelids were as gossamer as the rest of him. 

“No,” he said. “I didn’t jump.”

“Then I’m not fucking going to either.” 

“Why are you here?” Noah said. 

Ronan grinned, all pointed teeth. “I thought you enjoyed my winning personality.”

Noahh drifted backward toward the wall of the stone, almost disappearing back into it.

But Ronan had come here for a reason, more than just to look over the edge of the balcony and imagine the rush of the broomstick dive. He had come here to admit something. 

Noah was easy to talk to because he was dead, and also because he was Noah. Effusive, odd, and friendly. It wouldn’t be the first secret he had deposited up here, vents about professors and classmates and Declan. 

Today, Ronan said, “I can do things with magic I shouldn’t be able to do.” 

He was thinking about the feather. He had transfigured it just with a thought and intention. Thoughts and intention were both part of magic, but not the full formula. There were incantations and wand movements and rules. 

While Ronan and both his brothers were talented wizards, only Ronan and his father could do this. It was a secret Ronan was never supposed to tell. Before going away to Hogwarts his first year, Niall had sat Ronan down and had a long conversation about what magical things he shouldn’t be doing in class or for the entertainment of his classmates no matter how much he wanted to show off. 

It only felt like half-telling, telling it to Noah, who had never once spilled one of Ronan’s secrets. Who maybe didn’t have a single other person to speak to than Ronan. In all these years, Ronan had never crossed paths with another student or professor coming up this way. 

Noah didn’t ask any questions. He didn’t poke or prod that way. 

He said instead, “I’m here talking to you, and I’m dead.” 

“That’s different,” Ronan said, but with no heat. Ghosts existed well within the rules of magic. 

“I don’t know,” Noah said. “I don’t feel like I should…” his words drifted and his visibility drew thin. 

“Noah?” Ronan said. 

Noah jerked like Ronan had sunk up on him. 

He said, “Why are you here?” 

…

Ronan Lynch’s first five years at Hogwarts were unremarkable, or, at least, unremarkable as any time at a boarding school for young wizards and witches could be. There were exploding potions, detentions from sneaking out of the dorms after hours, Quidditch games, the incident with the chimera in Care of Magical Creatures class. All relatively normal occurrences at Hogwarts for an exuberant -- if slightly misbehaving -- student. 

That all changed the summer between Ronan’s fifth and sixth year when he was the one to discover his father dead. 

Cold, body stiff, an expression of noticeable horror on his expression the only tell of harm on him, all coming up to one easily-gathered conclusion: killing curse. There were a lot of ways of killing a wizard, poison or potion, your own bare hands. The killing curse implied something more than just murder, but an intense, deliberate intend to end life. Not everyone could conjure up casting this unforgivable curse. 

Ronan Lynch returned to Hogwarts for his sixth year a changed young man.

…

“You want us to waste out Hogsmeade trip sneaking into the most haunted house in the country?” Ronan drawled, unimpressed. “This is a worse plan than hanging out with the waitress.” 

“Oh,” Gansey said. “She’s coming with us.”

Adam had been reading through lunch. He had an exam next period. Well, technically Ronan did too, but Ronan didn’t care. All three of them were plopped at the far end of the Slytherin table, nearest the door. This wasn’t traditional, not sitting at your assigned lunch table, but lunchtime was hardly a formal feast and no one liked to tell Richard Campbell Gansey III what not to do; no one liked telling Ronan Lynch what to do either. 

Adam looked up now. “You talked to Blue?” he asked Gansey. 

Gansey was quiet for a prolonged moment. “You haven’t?”

“I’ve been busy… lately,” he said, troubled, eyes going unfocused as if he was seeing something beyond the tabletop where his gaze was aimed. 

Ronan sighed aggressively. If there were anyone in the world that could force aggression into something as innocuous as a sigh, just a gust of released breathe, it was Ronan Lynch. He really didn’t need to be be sitting in the middle of Adam and Gansey’s girl drama. 

“Well, I thought all of us could explore it,” Gansey said. “A tunnel in the most haunted house that isn’t actually haunted, that’s an actual mystery right here.” His eyes were alight with that energy as when he talked about Glendower. 

However, the day of the Hogsmeade trip and the hoped expedition into the Shrieking Shack that Gansey had convinced them all of, several feet of snow had plopped down on the grounds. Paths were carved out with magic between Hogwarts and Hogsmeade, and among Hogsmeade’s main roads and alleys, but not up to the Shrieking Shack. 

“No way,” the Sargent girl had said, where the clump of them were gathered outside the Three Broomsticks. Apparently, on principle, she didn’t go in there when she wasn’t working. “I don’t want to die today from snow and stupidity.” Her teeth were chattering. It was probably her own fault for for wearing artfully shredded jeans when it was below freezing. 

“The snow is taller than her,” Ronan said, and it almost even wasn’t an exaggeration. In fact, where the excess snow was piled up off the paths, it was taller than Ronan. 

“Shut it,” Sargent snapped at Ronan. 

“You did say the the shack was practically falling apart,” Adam, the voice of reason, said. “It would sure suck for it to collapse from the weight of the snow while we were in there.”

Gansey sighed. His breath fogged like a ghost in front of his face. “I guess we could wait.”

“It will still be there in the spring,” Adam said. The tip of his nose from pink from the cold. Ronan stared at it. 

Sargant stomped her two feet against the chill. “Let’s go get inside somewhere,” she said, and then lead them off to the Hogs Head because the Three Broomsticks wasn’t an option. It was a move that warmed Ronan to her a little as the Hogs Head was the dive pub of Hogsmeade and Ronan had tried to convince Gansey along with him there last trip. Sargent, apparently, had more persuasive power over Gansey. Ronan didn’t want to think too hard about why. 

...

The first day into Christmas break the school population was whittled down to about a fourth. Ronan wandered into the Great Hall and spotted Adam sitting at the end of Slytherin table by himself, as usual. Gansey had mentioned something about Parrish staying for break too, when Ronan wasn’t paying that much attention. Gansey had been all tentative to talk about Christmas with Ronan, especially in front of witnesses if it got Ronan to explode. There had been a hanging offer, that Ronan could come with Gansey back to his parents’ place for the holidays that Ronan had shrugged off. Witnessing someone else’s family’s holiday was worse than not having one of his own.

Ronan wandered over and stood across from Adam.

“So you are an orphan like me?” he asked, “Or you do just hate your family, also like me?” 

Ronan wasn’t technically an orphan. His mother was alive, but had been in St. Mungo’s since a nervous breakdown after his father’s death. As for the second point, the situation with Declan and Ronan was… complicated. Tense enough that the thought of spending almost a month in his flat that was definitely not their childhood home where they had spent every other Christmas before, with no parents, had Ronan signing up to stay at Hogwarts for break without a second thought. This had been to Matthew’s disappointed, but Ronan softened the blow by handing Matthew an early present on his way out and promising to -- ugh -- write. 

Adam blinked up at him. “What in hell kind of greeting is that?”

“Fuck off, Parrish,” Ronan said with no heat. “I’m just trying to make nice.”

“Is asking invasive personal questions the new definition of nice?” Adam said.

This was a mistake, Ronan thought. Parrish and him weren’t actually friends. Gansey was the fickle connection between them and he wasn’t here. Ronan had approached him as a matter of habit, not anything else. This had been a stupid idea from the start. Before he knew it his blood was beginning to pulse in his ears. 

Then Adam said, “Are you just going to loom there, or are going to sit down?”

Ronan clambered onto the bench with no ceremony and dug into the breakfast spread. 

After eating slovenly and eager for a solid five minutes, Ronan said around a swallow, “What’re you doing after breakfast? Don’t fucking say studying.”

Adam looked up from his plate with an expression that was both guilty and readable; that was exactly what Adam had been planning on. 

“Come on, Parrish. It’s the first day of break. There’s nothing to study.” 

“There’s plenty to study,” Adam said. 

“Like what? Our assignments can be done in a day, and that day is supposed to be the day right before classes start again.”

“Just because you don’t care about school, Lynch, doesn’t meant the rest of us have that luxury. Some of us don’t have the privilege of being raised magically, and taking everything we already know for granted.” 

Ronan squinted, then said with a scoff, “Are you saying you need to study because you're muggleborn?”

“I’m not muggleborn,” Adam snapped, which made everything more confusing. Now Ronan had no understanding of why Parrish had a compulsive need to study. However, he really didn’t care. He had another end in mind.

“Put off your studying for two hours, freak, and come down to the Quidditch pitch with me. I want to go flying.” 

After a staring contest, which Adam had no chance of winning no matter how dedicated he was in his grumpiness because Ronan held out his ‘I don’t give a shit’ blank look for the length of a Professor’s lecture on a regular basis, Adam agreed. He said, “Fine. But only because Gansey asked me to keep an eye on you so you don’t get yourself expelled over break.”

“You shouldn’t have told me that,” Ronan said. “Now I have leverage.” 

Ronan made Adam accompany him back to the Gryffindor Common Room, and then wait outside the portrait as he went to retrieve his broom from his dorm. 

“I can’t let you in,” Ronan said with a great, sneering joy. “It’s against the rules…” Both Adam and Ronan knew Ronan Lynch didn’t give a shit about the rules. However, being a shithead was the better half of his personality. 

When Ronan came back out with his broomstick lain across his shoulders, arms hooked up and over it, Adam said, “I don’t have a broom.”

“You can use one of the school brooms. They’re lame ass, but you can use one… Or…”

“Or what?” Adam said, like he was curious despite himself. 

Ronan smirked, showing his canines. “Andrew Pruett left his Nimbus here over break. I could go… borrow for it for you.”

“No,” Adam said, like a hammer. “I’m trying to keep you from being expelled, not get you committing an expellable offense.”

“They’re not going to expel me,” Ronan said. “I can only dream.”

They went down to the pitch. It was a mild day for late December. They got a school broom out of the shed. 

Adam weighed it across his hands. “I’ve flown since flying lessons first year,” Adam admitted. 

“That’s just fucking pathetic,” Ronan said. “You even remember how?” 

“Yes,” Adam said, all sharp-ish. 

That’s how Adam was: sharp. In a different way than Ronan. In a way that was often surprising from the otherwise quiet, dedicated, top-of-the-class student. It was one of the things that made him fun to hang out with. Gansey was often trying to placate Ronan, or to counter-attack his explosive, chemical reaction nature. It was not that him and Gansey weren’t friends or weren’t good friends. They were. 

Ronan had met Gansey at the beginning of last summer, when Hogwarts was just a glimmer in Gansey’s future. They had clicked right away and had a swell of adventures before tragedy had struck the Lynch family. And Gansey had been there for that as well. For the grieving, the numbed out horror, the anger, the drinking. Through the Lynch brothers moving out of their childhood home. Through Ronan’s verbal battles, screaming matches, and straight out duals with Declan. None of Ronan’s casual school friends had been their, and being there, every step, every day, through something intense and real. It was a new friendship forged by fire. 

Unlike the rest of the student population, Adam wasn’t afraid of Ronan. Unlike Gansey, Adam wasn’t patient with Ronan. 

“Then catch up, asshole,” Ronan said, and kicked off the ground, zooming up and up, curving around the goalposts. Leaning close to his broomstick, he flew full speed down the length of the pitch. He barely see, the wind whipped around his face that a cold slap, and he didn’t stop. He let out a wooping yell. 

Ronan pull to a rough stop right before the opposite set of goals and hovered there before them like he was a keeper. He squinted across the pitch. Adam was a speck near the lawn. 

He pointed his broom in Adam’s direction and dived. 

“What the hell?” Adam said when Ronan pulled up to a stop right in front of him. 

“What the hell back at you, Parrish. What’re you, like, two feet off the ground?” 

“I know your education is failing you if you think this is two feet,” Adam said back. Although it was again sharp-ish, Ronan saw the way Adam’s grip on the broom was white-knuckled tight, the way his shoulders were arched. He was tense, unsure, and clinging on a broom. Which of was shame, because Ronan knew the hallowed truth: flying was like freedom. Adam, wound up enough, could probably use something like flying. 

“Race you, loser,” Ronan said, looped around Adam, and then was off before Adam could respond, but when he glanced over his shoulder a moment later, he saw Adam following behind, because Adam couldn’t turn down a challenge. 

There was no way for Adam to win, not with a school broom against Ronan’s Firebolt Z, not without practice against Ronan’s years of practice, not with Ronan’s head start, but Ronan supposed someone didn’t become the top of their class without facing up to a challenge now and again. 

There was no ending line to this race. They just dashed around the pitch. Adam’s turns were slow and over-cautious. He engaged in none of the daring dives or loop-de-loops Ronan did, feeling a thrilling when he lifted off his broom when he was moving too fast, the way his gut lurched at fast drops and twists and transitions, at the speeding pace of his heart. 

It was nice to fly alone. It’s all Ronan had done this school year, sneaking out the class late at night, when the quidditch pitch was definitely empty and there was no one around to catch him at it. There was a different flavor of satisfaction of flying with company, like he used to with his father, with his brothers, with his team. 

With flying’s all-consuming nature, it took Ronan a few moments to realize when Adam had stopped flying with him. Adam was held steady on his broom over the goalposts. Ronan turned his broom and flew toward him, slowly this time, like approaching a strange animal. 

“The castle looks amazing from up here,” Adam said. “I’ve been coming here for five and a half years, and I almost still can’t believe it’s real.”

“The castle?” Ronan asked. 

“Hogwarts. Magic. All of it.” 

“You sure talk like a muggleborn,” Ronan said. He meant nothing by it, but something ruddy rose up under Adam’s tan skin, either embarrassment or anger. 

And, boy, did it draw attention to his freckles, to the angle of his cheekbones. Something squirmed in Ronan’s gut, like a cauldron boiling over, and it had nothing to do with heights or flying. 

Oh. Oh, oh, oh. 

“There’s nothing wrong with being a muggleborn,” Ronan said. 

“I know,” Adam said. Then he was quiet. He was still looking at the castle, but he could’ve been looking anywhere. “My mother’s a witch,” he said. “But I’ve never seen her do magic… I didn’t know until I got my Hogwarts letter.” 

Ronan, who had lived a childhood filled with magic, couldn’t imagine living any part of his life without it. 

Adam ducked his head. “I never told anyone but Blue that before.”

“I thought you two weren’t dating?”

“We’re not,” Adam said with an exhaustion. “We’re friends. And also… she’s a squid. She understand what it feels like not to belong.” A cloud shifted, made the sun glare bright right on them. Adam blinked. “There must not be enough oxygen up here, because I’m just saying things…” 

“It’s time for lunch anyway,” Ronan said, as disinterested as he can, because he can hear the edging need for escape, the whine of a trapped animal, so he’ll give it. He’ll give it and make it seem like he doesn’t even care. 

“I’ll beat your slow ass back to the school,” Ronan said, and doesn’t give time for Adam to respond before he was again moving. 

...

 

Come Christmas morning, there were packages from Matthew and Gansey at the end of Ronan’s bed, but he couldn’t bring himself to tear open the wrapping. Instead, he dug to the bottom of his trunk for something illicit he had smuggled away there: a bottle of firewhiskey. 

He waited for the common room to clear out so he didn’t get any accidental cheer tossed at him, then snuck out with his contraband and made his way to the tower. 

“Why are you here?” Noah said, upon Ronan’s appearance.

“Merry Christmas to you too, asshole,” Ronan said in somewhat out a growl. He pointed his wand at the cork and it popped out of the bottle with such force it hurtled over the railing and down a long fall. No matter, Ronan planned on drinking the entire bottle anyway. 

“It’s Christmas?” Noah said, as elusive as a cloud. Then, becoming a little more solid, “Right. It’s Christmas.” 

Ronan took a sip from the bottle. It burned all the way down his esophagus and landed crackling in his stomach. That first gush of pleasure from alcohol -- the vacancy, the looseness, the gloss it painted on the world -- followed a few seconds later. 

“What about Adam?” Noah said. 

Ronan jerked his head in Noah’s reaction, like an animal reacting to sound. “What do you know about Adam? Does he come up here?”

“No,” Noah said. He tried leaning on the railing beside Ronan, but sifted right through. “But I’ve seen him around.”

Ronan squinted, glare-like. “But you never leave the tower.”

“Yes, I do,” Noah said. “Just because you don’t see me doesn’t meant that I’m not around.” 

“Merlin, Noah,” Ronan said. He took another sip of the firewhiskey. “That’s creepy as fuck.” 

Offended or something, Noah’s drifted away into nothing but air. Only watching from the corner of his eye, Ronan wasn’t sure exactly sure of when his departure went from ‘barely there’ to ‘not there at all.’ All the the while, he drank. 

Some indistinct time later, maybe an hour, Ronan was sunk down against the wall, knees drawn up, eyes hazed over in true inebriation. 

“My father was murdered,” he said, and Noah was there, sitting beside him. When he came back, Ronan had no clue. 

“I know,” Noah said. 

It wasn’t exactly a confession. His death had been public knowledge, blasted over newspapers, investigated, gossiped about. It was known. But it was still a confession, coming aloud from Ronan, admitting the volcanic core of his pain. 

Noah said, then, “I was murdered too.”

...

“Oi! Parrish!”

Ronan, drunk, uneven on his two feet pushed off the wall in the Entrance Hall where he had relocated once the evening had become too unbearably cold to remain up on the tower. He knew Parrish was off in Hogsmeade with that weird Sargeant girl, the weird Divination professor, and -- by the rules of extrapolation -- their probably weird family. 

“I thought you weren’t dating Sargeant,” Ronan had said, again, when he heard Adam’s Christmas Day plans. 

“I’m not,” Adam had replied. “We’re friends.” He said ‘friends’ with a particular emphasis that made Ronan suspect that Adam didn’t quite label Ronan in the same category as Sargent. 

“Oh, I get. It’s Poldma you’re dating.” 

To which Adam punched him in the arm. It was awesome. 

Now, dark outside, Parrish had returned from Hogsmeade. 

“Lynch?” he said, as Ronan stumbled in his general direction. Then, he smell of alcohol must of reached him, for he recoiled. “Really? This is what you did with your Christmas?”

“Man,” Ronan said, close enough, and reached out and tugged on the loose end of Adam’s scarf. “I got more.” He lifted the bottle, about a third left. Firewhiskey being strong, and Ronan not really eating much today, meant he had to pace himself. He didn’t want to blackout, but every the world sharpened up, he took another swig. He wanted to stay untethered from reality. 

“You’ve had enough,” Adam said, voice strangely scratchy. Maybe from the cold outside. 

“This will warm you up.” Ronan pressed the bottle into Adam’s hands, which he accepted only to keep it from dropping. 

Adam tisked, staring down at the bottle in his hands. It was very teachery. “Gansey really owes me one,” he said. 

“Don’t -- Don’t talk about Gansey right now.” Gansey wasn’t here; Gansey had went home, had left Ronan here. 

It didn’t matter, right now, that Gansey had laid out an invitation for Ronan to come to his house for Christmas break. It didn’t matter because Ronan had all day, alone and drinking, had worked himself up, and being mad at Gansey was an easy target. That anger would’ve worked itself out by the time Gansey returned. 

Really, he was angry at Declan, suddenly foreign instead of his blood. He was angry at Noah for, after all these years of a strange and supposed friendship, suddenly dropping a vicious detail about his death. He was angry with every single one of his professors who wanted him to care about class when the blocks that had built up his life had been shifted around. 

Under all that anger was a secret layer, an anger he wouldn’t admit sober. That was the cross side of drinking. It could loosen you from your pain, but it also revealed things that you lied to yourself about, pretended every day wasn’t there. 

Ronan was angry at his father. He was angry at him for dying, for being murdered, for evoking in someone so much hate to be murdered. For never giving Ronan a full explanation for his special type of magic. For forgetting that his family needed him; that Ronan needed him. 

It was a type of anger so wrapped up in grief and guilt and other hurtful things. It was an anger Ronan couldn’t admit outloud, could barely admit to himself. 

So, Ronan would be angry at Gansey instead. And Adam, too, if was convenient right now, with Adam hauling one of his arms over his shoulders to heave Ronan steady in walking-like facsimile.

“I’m taking you back to your dorm,” Adam said. 

“Don’t take me back there,” Ronan said, or maybe slurred. He wasn’t sure; it made sense to him. Still, he walked where Adam directed him. Anything else would be too complicated. “I can’t drink there.” 

“I think you’re done drinking for the night,” Adam said, lead-pulling-heaving Ronan out of the Entrance Hall. 

“I think you’re done drinking for the night,” Ronan repeated back, nasally and mocking.

“This way,” Adam said, pulling him around a corner and elbowing him in the side while he was at it. 

“Come on, Parrish. Have some.”

Adam shoved the bottle back at Ronan. “No,” he said. 

“Don’t be such a hardass. Have fun for once. Act like a normal fucking …”

The support of Adam’s arms, of Adam’s body, dropped away so fast Ronan stumbled sideways, caught himself on the wall. 

“You know what,” Adam said. “Make your own way back to dorm.” Adam stormed off. Ronan -- head dizzy from the sudden stumble -- had no stability to go after him. He shut his eyes. 

“More for me then!” he shouted after Adam, but Adam was gone from the corridor, maybe far gone. Ronan had no assurance his last word was heard. 

Somehow, Ronan did eventually make it back to him dorm room. He collapsed in his bed and stayed there for the next fourteen hours straight. He got up for the bathroom twice, but otherwise laid their, head throbbing, working himself pissed off at a new, convenient target. 

Ronan and Adam didn’t speak for the rest of Christmas break. 

...

When Gansey returned, he noticed the rift right away when he spotted Ronan and Adam sitting at different tables in the Great Hall. 

Gansey came over to stand beside Ronan.

“What did you do?” he asked. 

“Ravenclaw table’s over there, Dick.” 

“And I’ll be sitting with Adam, if you care to get your head out of your ass.” 

Ronan sat glowering at his plate as his classmates chattered around him about what they did over break, about the gifts they got, about the homework they didn’t do. 

An unexpected arm latched around the back of Ronan’s neck. Only catching sight of golden curls and a black and yellow scarf stopped him from lashing out in immediate reaction. It was Matthew. 

“Did you like it?” Matthew said, squeezing himself onto the bench beside Ronan. 

“What are you on about?” Ronan said. 

“Your Christmas gift? Did you like it?” 

“Uh.” Ronan blanked. Then he remembered, vaguely, a notion that he had kicked them under his bed when he had returned to his dorm ravingly drunk on Christmas night. “I haven’t opened it yet.”

“You haven’t opened it yet?” Matthew repeated, like this was the absurdist proposition he’d ever heard. He’d probably opened Ronan’s gift as soon as he was on the carriage to the train, which is to say three to six minutes after Ronan had handed it to him. Then, something crinkled around Matthew’s eyes like betrayal and hurt. 

“I was saving it,” Ronan said, in a moment of quick thinking. “To open it with you.” 

All the concerning parts of Matthew’s expression smoothed away, until he was glowing again. 

“I’ll bring it down for breakfast tomorrow,” he promised, patting Matthew on the back as he scurried back to his collective of friends at the Hufflepuff table. 

Ronan took a measured breathe, and it was more like a dragon preparing fire than any variety of soothing. He stood. He received a more than a few uneasy stares from the classmates around him. He ignored them, stomping off towards the Slytherin table where Adam and Gansey were enjoying the welcome back feast, fuck them. 

He took another dragon breath. 

He stopped at the far end of the table, where his two friends sat. Ronan didn’t have many friends, probably because he wasn’t one for casual. Matthew could collect friends like they were wildflowers in a spring field and be just as unbothered when they wilted. Ronan treated friendship like planting a tree; it was going to be there for a good, long while. 

Gansey turned his attention to Ronan, and said like a parent after a child had a temper tantrum, “So you’ve decided to join us?” 

Adam just glanced at Ronan and away with that practiced, cold shoulder attitude he had shared with Ronan that last few days. 

“When you’re done eating, I want you to meet someone,” Ronan said, which wasn’t what either Adam or Gasney was expecting him to say. 

So unexpected, it caused Adam to break his silence to ask, “Meet who?”

To which Ronan answered, “Noah.”


	4. Gansey

Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry didn’t usually accept transfer students, but Richard Campbell Gansey III wasn’t a normal student. Even adjusting for being from a wealthy, well-established, influential wizarding family, Richard Campbell Gansey III -- Gansey to his friends and associates -- wasn’t normal. 

#

“I feel sorry for him,” Adam said. 

“Ronan?” Gansey proposed. They had just been talking about him and his absence at their planned library meetup. Or Gansey had been talking about him and his absence at their planned library meet up while Adam made quiet, disgruntled faces. 

Since looping Adam into their friend group, Gansey had gotten to spend more time in the library. Resistent to do homework, resistent to go to class, Ronan was similarly resistant to go to the library. Adam went their all the time, although his interest was more in studying than Gansey’s interest in pursuing the ancient and unique finding of the Hogwarts library collection. 

“No. Noah,” Adam said. It had been two days since their introduction to Ronan’s ghost friend. It had come as a shock. 

Gansey didn’t believe that he knew everything about Ronan Lynch. He hadn’t know him even the length of the year, and witnessed the troubled depths of the Lynch family dynamics. However, he was confident with some things, like the fact that Ronan Lynch had no friends at Hogwarts he bothered to entertain after his father’s death. Or, Gansey had been confident.

“He’s so young,” Adam said. “I mean, he was. He’s wearing his school robes.”

“So is Moaning Myrtle,” Gansey said. 

“Yeah, but she tries to creep on guys in the bathroom. I’m a little less sympathetic,” Adam said. “Noah seems nice. Strange, but nice.” 

“I’m glad he has a friend,” Gansey said, and he was talking about Ronan and Noah simultaneously. 

Adam tapped the tip of his quill on rim of the inkpot, and said no more. 

# 

“Don’t you point that thing at me, Gansey!” Blue snapped, holding up a finger that seemed just as dangerous as the wand Gansey was holding, end directed at her. 

“I was going to levitate you down,” he said. The four of them -- Gansey, Blue, Ronan, and Adam -- were standing around the opened trap door in the Shrieking Shack, ready finally to explore it. 

“You will do no such thing,” Blue said. 

“How are you going to…?” Gansey started, but Blue was already swinging her backpack off her shoulders. Riffling around momentarily, she pulled out a length of rope. 

Ronan kicked at a loose baseboard, releasing a puff of dust. “This is the shittiest haunted house I’ve ever been in,” he said, 

“Well, obviously it’s not haunted,” Adam replied, and it was terse. A fight had definitely happened between the two of them over Christmas break, the details of which neither were willing to share with Gansey. He supposed he shouldn’t be surprised. Ronan was an easy person to get in fights with mostly because he was so good at picking them. 

“So it’s just a shitty old house?” Ronan said. 

“It’s not just an old house,” Gansey retorted, but he didn’t know a way to explain that wasn’t silly. This wasn’t just an old house, not when they were standing at the mouth of a secret tunnel to who knows where. It was mystery. And mysteries were some of Gansey’s favorite things, because if he could solve one mystery, he could solve another, and maybe, eventually, his own. 

“Blue, what are you doing with that rope?” he asked. Blue was clearly tying one end of the rope to a nearby banister post of the rickety staircase. “You are not climbing down there,” he said, as Blue gave the rope an experimental tug. 

“I am too,” she said. “Because I’m going to get down there on my own, without magic.” 

“Blue,” Adam said calmly, as though this type of behavior was quite normal to him, “I respect what you’re trying to do, but this house is falling apart.” Behind him, Ronan kicked an experimental hole in the wall. “I’m not sure if that banister is going to hold you.”

“Fine,” she said. “You boys can hold the other end of the rope.” Which was how the three of them ended up securing the rope as Blue climbed her way down the trapdoor. It wasn’t so deep for a fall to be deadly, but it was deeper than could jumped down from the top without a broken bone or three. 

“I’m at the bottom!” Blue shouted back up once she was down. 

“Let’s leave her down there,” Rona muttered. 

Adam turned to where the rope was still tied to the banister and muttered a spell to secure it, probably thinking of the climb back up. “Don’t tell Blue,” he mouthed to Gansey. 

The three of them took turns levitating themselves down the trapdoor to where Blue was waiting for them. 

“Look how fast we got down here with fucking magic,” Ronan said. 

“Don’t start with me, Lynch.” 

“No arguing,” Gansey said. “We’re on an adventure.” He was still hard at working integrating these different people he had met, that he liked, that he found fascinating. All three of them -- Ronan, Adam, and Blue -- were strong-willed. None of them were ready to get railroaded by the others. 

In lieu of arguing, Blue went rifling through her bag again, and pulled out a strange, oblong device. She clicked a button on it, and from the end glared a bright light. 

“What the hell is that?” Ronan said, drawing up an arm to protect his eyes because Blue was directing it straight in his face. 

“It’s a flashlight,” Adam replied. If Adam knew the answer, it meant it was a muggle thing. He had confined with Gansey a little bit about his unique upbringing.

“Did you think I was going to rely on you fools for light?” she said. She pointed the so-called flashlight down the tunnel. Gansey’s heart thudded; the tunnel stretched on far beyond the reach of the light. 

“Blue has the right idea,” Gansey said, holding his wand aloft and casting a lumos spell. 

Adam and Ronan too lifted their wands, chanting, ‘Lumos’ under theirs breathes. Under all the light piled on top of each other did the tunnel lose some of it’s creepiness. It was an earthen tunnel with no adornments, with some bugs scuttling always from their presence. 

It was a curious thing, seeing other people’s wands, and what they revealed about them in a coded fashion. Adam’s wand was an ashy-brown color, of medium length and a sturdy thickness, and fairly unembellished, but well kept. Ronan’s was long and almost looked like it was a stick yanked off a tree than a proper wand. Gansey’s, well, was chestnut brown, strictly straight, and had a fancy handle, looking all too much like everyone would expect from a wand that belonged to a Gansey. 

“Let’s get going,” Gansey said, leading the way, not for the need to lead, but because he couldn’t hang back any longer. This trap down had been teasing and twisting in the back of his mind for months. 

The tunnel started off as normally as one would expect of a secret tunnel, although at one point it go so narrow they all -- even Blue -- had to hunch over nearly in half to keep on walking. 

“Keep an eye out,” Gansey said, once the tunnel widened again. Ronan, who was the tallest and thus having the most miserable time, cricked his neck. 

“For what?” Adam asked. 

“Anything,” Gansey said. That was all he knew to look for: signs or traps or buried treasure. Secret tunnels had to exist for some purpose. Everything needed to have a purpose. 

“Hey,” Blue called from where she had journey a few yards up ahead. “I think I found the end.” 

Gansey jogged up to her, but the end she spoke of was not the end he was looking for. Her flashlight was pointed at a wall of dirt. The tunnel went to further. 

“No,” he said. He reached forward a pressed his hand to the earth, cold and solid. “Nux,” he breathed, putting out the light on his wand, and then gave it a wave, trying a reveal spell. There must be a hidden passage or a enchantment disguising the way. He tried one spell, then another, then another. 

“What’s that up there?” Adam said, now that he and Ronan had mosied there way up to join the other two. He motioned with his wand in a direction over Gansey’s head. Gansey craned his neck up. 

There was a small hole through which a patch of light could be seen.

“So who’s sticking their head through the mysterious whole to whereever first,” Ronan said, dragging his words thick through sarcasm. “Not me.” 

“Why not you. You’re the tallest,” Blue said. 

Up. Of course up, Gansey thought. They had gone down to get here. 

“Because I’m only here under duress,” Ronan retorted. 

“I didn’t realize fancy-pants Gansey was intimidating enough to cause duress.” 

But was the whole big enough for a person to get through? If they were seeing daylight, did the whole lead to outside? Was it safe? Would that stop him? 

“Nah, it’s Parrish who's the intimidating one,” Ronan said. “Have you ever seen his face when you interrupt him studying.” 

“Yes, actually,” Blue said. 

“Boost me up,” Gansey said. “I want to see.” 

After a short debate about safety and logistics, Ronan and Adam each ended up bracing either of Gansey’s feet and hauling him to peer through the whole. Gansey squinted through the light. He saw… branches? 

“You done, Dick?” Ronan grunted. 

“It’s a tree,” Gansey said. “The tunnel comes up under a tree.”

“Just drop him,” Ronan said, probably to Adam, but for Gansey to hear. 

“Okay, let me down,” Gansey said quickly, and was lowered with little grace. 

“Under a tree?” Adam asked. 

“Between the roots.”

“I guess that’s hidden.” 

“Alright, my turn,” Blue said stepping forward. 

Gansey and Adam hauled her up. She immediately started to dig the hole wider. The dirt, dead leaves, and underbrush fell easily away and also into Gansey and Adam’s face. “Higher,” she said, and they tried. She gasped in the faintest way possible. 

“It’s Hogwarts,” she said. “I’ve never seen it from this angle.” 

“What do you mean it’s Hogwarts?” Gansey said as they lowered her down. “We’re not in the castle.”

“No, I can see the castle.” 

“We’re under a tree, near the castle,” Adam said, repeated, voice as drifty as the wind. 

“I thought you were better at paying attention than me, Parrish,” Ronan said. 

“Lift me up,” Adam said, determined as an order. 

“By Merlin’s balls,” Ronan swore, but he did with Gansey’s aid. 

Adam only stayed up a few seconds. 

“It’s under the Whomping Willow,” he said. “The tunnel. That’s… hidden and guarded.”

“How would someone get in or out?” Blue asked. 

“How do you even know what the Whomping Willow is?” Ronan asked next. 

Blue leveled a glare on him, and if glares could cast curses, Ronan would’ve been turned into a toad. 

Gansey rubbed his hand over his chin in thought, then looked down at his hands, dirt-smudged from going under Blue’s and Adam’s shoes. 

“There must be a way to stop a willow from whomping,” Adam proposed. His hands were also dirt-smudged, but he had remembered not to rub his face. 

“But why?” Gansey said. Because finding the path of the tunnel, and now the destination, it was another mystery. A mystery paradox. A mystery cyclone. A mystery with no answer was horribly unsatisfying. “Why run a tunnel between a haunted house and a killer tree?” 

“Didn’t they use a tunnel like that,” Ronan said. “You know,... during the Battle of Hogwarts.”

“If you paid attention in history you’d know that tunnel ran from the Hog’s Head into the castle itself,” Adam replied. 

“Maybe the history book is lying,” Ronan said. “Maybe there was another.” 

“Well, obviously there was another,” Adam said. “We’re standing in it.”

“Okay, boys,” Blue said. “If we’re not going through there because our heads will get whomped off, can we have this invigorating conversation on the way back. I have work this afternoon.”

“You couldn’t have taken off?” Ronan challenged. 

“Some of aren’t millionaires. Actually, most of the population aren’t millionaires. We do things called jobs. Get things called wages.” 

“Sounds fucking awful,” Ronan said. “Sure glad I’m rich.” 

“Alright, everyone,” Gansey said. “Let’s head back.” He pressed that dirt-smudged hand to his forehead now. There was nothing more they could do here today, he thought. 

“There’s nothing more we can do here today,” he said. 

So they tromped back, Ronan swearing when his head would hit the low-hanging roof, Blue half-humming some song Gansey didn’t recognize, Adam thoughtful.

So they climbed and levitated out, each to their own ability. So they exited the Shrieking Shack. The whole while, and after, and that night Gansey felt like he had been unfairly tricked. A tunnel wasn’t just a tunnel. It couldn’t be. It was a connection or pathway to something or somewhere. All mysteries had solutions. All voices had sources. 

#

Gansey didn’t know what types of things he should bring to appease a ghost. Noah wasn’t a vicious ghost; he was quite affable if -- as Adam said -- a little strange. However, he also seemed… flimsy. 

During his introduction, Noah had gone so see-through he had outright disappeared, provoking Ronan to yell to the clear air ‘Oh, come on! We’re talking here.’ Noah had reappeared a few minutes later. 

So, as Gansey tromped up the long, curving staircase up to the top of the tower, he fortified himself with what he had brought: himself. Hopefully, the gift of a visitation would be enough to get Noah to speak with him. 

On the tower’s balcony, the wind was coarsely cold. Gansey, ever prepared, pulled his wool cloak tighter over his shoulders. 

“Noah?” he said, but his voice was little against the billowing wind. Far over the forest, gloomy clouds were rolling closer to the castle. 

“Yes?”

Gansey jumped. Noah had answered from very, very closely behind him. 

“There you are,” Gansey said, at an attempt at pleasantly. His fortitude had been shaken. 

“Gansey,” Noah said. 

“Yes,” Gansey said, although he wasn’t sure it was a question.

Noah looked like a thick fog, which meant he didn’t look solid, but he looked more substantial than the last time Gansey had seen him. 

“Why are you here?” Noah said.

“I wanted to talk to you about something,” Gansey said. He squeezed he gloved hands under his cloak. “It’s a sensitive topic, so I hope it doesn’t offend you, but it’s something I -- it’s something I need to know.” 

Noah stared at Gansey for a long moment, unblinking. Did ghosts need to blink? No, of course not, Gansey thought. Ghosts didn’t need to breath or eat or perform any of the functions of the living. Any of the ticks they did still do -- blink, sigh, and other -- were only done because they an imitation of the living, a reflection of the bodies they once had. 

“Go ahead and ask,” Noah said, like he knew. “Everyone’s afraid to ask.”

“What’s it like to die?” Gansey said. 

Noah squinted at him, curious and innocent. “Don’t you know?”

Gansey sucked in a breath. The cold air hurt his lungs, deep in his chest. His equilibrium shifted and he had to grab the railing to keep from falling. 

“I mean, what’s it like… after?” 

Noah drifted, as thin as the wind, looking off to the far horizon, where the sunset was painting the sky under the clump of invading clouds. He said, “I don’t know. I was too scared -- I didn’t expect it. That’s why I’m still here.” 

#

Gansey,

I am writing to tell you I received your letter. I am also writing to tell you, first and foremost, I am not your errand girl no matter how many sugary words you try to coat your requests in. Lucky for you, I’m also very interested the mystery of the Shrieking Shack and its hidden tunnel. Of my own volition and curiosity did I start to investigate. Because replying to your letter is an obligation of basic etiquette one way or the other, I have decided to include my findings. As long as we are very clear on that, I will continue. 

Just because I’ve lived in Hogsmeade my whole life doesn’t mean I’m an expert on all these Hogsmeade, another incorrect assumption from your letter. However, compared to you I am an expert. What I am an expert in is getting small town people gossiping. 

Almost everyone from tikes to ancients has Shrieking Shack stories, of howls they’ve heard, of unsettling feelings as they walked past. I got one group of old biddies that came in for lunch at the Three Broomsticks who have come to an unsure consensus that the Shrieking SHack used to be be really active back in the 70s, and also around the full moons. One of said biddies has a maiden aunt who swears that the Shrieking Shack didn’t used to always be there, but they think it’s just her memory going. I’m planning to pursue this after work tonight. I will keep you informed. 

Again, not your errand girl, 

Blue 

#

Gansey refolded the parchment with precise movements, sharpening the creases Blue had put in there first. 

He was sitting by himself in the Great Hall. It was the trailing end of dinner time. Adam had left a while ago. Ronan hadn’t shown up at all. 

Gansey glanced up at the head table. It was empty except for Professor Poldma staring rather intently into her cup of tea. 

He got up and walked himself up two floors and one wing over to find the exact door he needed to knock on to hope the someone he was looking for would answer it. 

“Enter,” called a voice, the large wooden door swinging open by itself. 

Professor Caldwell sat curled over his desk, quill scratching on a length of unrolled parchment, probably an essay he was grading. Professor Caldwell was generous with his notes and comments on student essays. 

“Hello, Professor.” 

“Well, good evening, Mr. Gansey. What do I owe this visit for? Concerns about your essay topic?”

“No, no,” Gansey said, taking a chair in front of Caldwell’s desk. “Although the historical roots of charms in the medieval ages is certaining fascinating.” 

“Oh, I agree,” Caldwell said, setting down his quill. He was a chatty fellow, which worked to advantage and disadvantage. Gansey didn’t have time for the chatting, but the chatting was a great way to finagle a favor. “I’m always excited with NEWT levels, when we really get to dig into the deep theoreticals of magic. Of course, scholarships love that for transfiguration and potions and such, but the charms have such unique and often -- well, if you working on your essay you’ve already seen -- bawdy origins.”

“I’ve never blushed so much while doing homework,” Gansey said.

Caldwell laughed. He leaned back in his chair, a posture relaxed and exact opposite of when Gansey had entered. Gansey had done his part by bringing pleasantness to the professor’s evening. 

“If you’re not here to discuss your homework, whatever are you doing here? Most students wouldn’t be caught dead in a professor’s office except under duress.” 

Gansey shifted in his chair, moving in a tiny inch closer, like he was conspiring. It didn’t matter that the gulf between them was still several feet. 

“Actually,” he said. “I needed a favor.” 

“Oh?” Caldwell said, raising his eyebrows that were of salt-and-pepper coloring and feathery. 

“Remember last semester when I asked for special permission to visit Hogsmeade?” 

“You were interested in the history of the town, I believe?”

“Oh, yes,” Gansey said, and he had been; mostly the history of the Shrieking Shack. “The only all-wizard town in the country, it’s fascinating.” 

“I hear what you’re asking, Mr. Gansey. You need special permission again.” Caldwall dragged a spare scrap of parchment in front of him, knocking eschew the essay he had been bothering over. “Were you thinking this weekend?”

“Actually, sir, tonight.”

“Tonight?” Caldwell said, for the first time shocked from a turn in their conversation. “It’s already dark out.”

“Only because it’s winter,” Gansey replied. “It’s not that late.” His knee jiggled with nerves. Gansey pressed his folded hands on top of it, holding it down. 

“I’m not sure if it’s appropriate for --”

“I’ll be sure to mention to my mother how much you support my unique educational pursuits,” Gansey said. It was a zinger of a play, something that implicitly existed through this whole exchange that Gansey had just slammed down, all exposed. He hated himself, a little bit, for this. Richard Campbell Gansey III wanted to exist separately from everything that made him Richard Campbell Gansey III. 

“You, of all people, Professor,” Gansey said. “Understands the interest in educational arenas that other people overlook.” 

Caldwell hummed. His eyes were gazed over to some other place, in not the conversation with Gansey, but the conversations Gansey could be having with him more influential family members. Professor Caldwell was always trying to study grants from the Ministry for exhibitions to study obscure and relatively meaningless pieces of magical history. 

“Well, if you’re going to mention…”

“Your support,” Gansey supplied. “And how fascinating your class is. And how beneficial it is to learn from a top scholar in his field. Of course.” 

Professor Caldwell wrote Gansey up a permission note. As soon as he was out of the office, his careful Gansey-family smile melted off his face. That all took too much time. He had no time to lose. 

#

“By Merlin, what are you doing here?” 

Gansey shifted his feet. He stood on the front porch of Blue’s house. Before he had lifted his arm to knock, the door had swung open, revealing Blue framed by the warm light of inside. Blue, bundled up against the chilly night, breeze crisp as fresh cut glass, with a bundle under one arm. 

“I came here to talk to that maiden aunt with you,” Gansey said. “Is it too late?” 

“No, I was just about to go over.” 

She stepped out on the porch and shut the door. Evening darkness bathed them, Blue’s skin in fact blueish and unreal in only the distance light of the moon and the gas lamps up the street. 

“Gansey?” she said.

Gansey swallowed. There was nothing in his mouth or throat and yet he swallowed, and felt as if he were swallowing the world. 

“Lead the way,” he said.

Blue lead him through town, through the twisting knots of side streets, to a cottage house on its own little plot, a henhouse along the side yard.

“Let me do the talking,” she said, then knocked on the door. 

The door was opened by a squat-shaped elderly woman with a pair of very round, very tiny spectacles perched on the end of her very long nose. The woman squinted. “You’re the girl who de-gnomed my garden this morning,” she said. 

“Yes,” Blue said, more loudly and more cheery than Gansey had expected. “My name’s Blue, remember? Also remember how got to talking about my mother’s famous mugwort-banana loaf?”

Blue held out the package she had carried under her arm and pulled back the embroidered cloth napkin she had covered it with to reveal a lumpy shaped thing that generously could be called bread. “Well, I ran myself home and cooked it up right away for you.”

“What type a loaf did you say again, dear?”

“Mugwort-banana, Maam.” Blue grinned, all teeth. “Good for the mind, good for the colon.” 

The woman peered at Blue through her tiny little glasses, then peered at Gansey through her tiny little glasses, and then peered at the loaf through her tiny little glasses. 

“You best come inside, then,” the woman said, hobbling back to allow them entrance. 

They stepped inside a cramped but cozy sitting room, warmed by the fireplace, filled with furniture and throws that seemed as old as the woman herself. 

“I’ll make tea,” the woman said, taking the loaf from Blue and then hobbling over to the next room, probably the kitchen. 

Blue nudged Gansey in the side and hissed, “Take a seat.” 

They sat side-by-by on a short coach, which was all innocent enough, except for the weak cushions betraying them when they sat, smushing the two of them together, thigh-to-thigh, and too awkward to move out of. Blue’s warmth heated up the entire length of Gansey’s right side. 

“What’s going on?” he asked, clinking and clanked and the spur of a facet singing in from the kitchen. 

“I helped with some gardening earlier,” Blue said, checking over the kitchen, and continued, quietly. “Y’know, a neighborly thing. A youth respecting their elder. Broke the ice. Gained trust. I may or may not have directed a conversation towards baked goods. So now I have an excuse to bring said baked goods over. Everyone knows a good, old lady like that can’t accept baked goods without inviting you in for some tea and slice.” 

“That’s diabolical, Blue,” Gansey said. “You’re absolutely amazing.” That second part was supposed to stay in his head. Blue’s cheeks were ruddy from the cold outside still. 

A few minutes later, the woman came back, a wobbly-held tray in her hands, with a kettle and cups and the loaf sliced up. Gansey nibbled the loaf with polite horror for something that was supposed to be both good for the memory and the colon and sipped his tea with polite relief that it was actually good. 

He let Blue talk. 

Merlin, was she amazing at it. All small town charm, ‘yes, maam’ and ‘yes, please’ and ‘don’t you think so?’. That last one directed at Gansey a few times so he could nod and add ‘yes, of course’ in a way that made him seem a part of the conversation. Blue segued threw town gossip, the price of pickled slugs nowadays, how the woman’s creaky knee was predicting rain. Gansey couldn’t trace the path himself, but it somehow all ended up leading quite perfectly and naturally into Blue saying: “Well, actually, we’ve been studying the town history. You know, to preserve it.” 

“That’s wonderful. Not many young people care much all the things that came before them.” 

“I know,” Blue said. “Our generation’s the worst.”

“I’ve lived in this town my entire life,” the woman said, wistfully. “I’ve seen a lot.”

Blue shifted beside Gansey on the couch, an eagerness in the gesture. They had arrived at the striking point. 

“Would you happen to know anything about the Shrieking Shack?” Blue asked, tone filled with pure curiosity and innocence. 

“The Shrieking Shack? I remember when we just called that shack up on the hill. It wasn’t always there, you know. When I was a little girl, it wasn’t there.” 

Blue dug her elbow into Gansey side, but he had heard. 

“What was there?” Gansey said. 

“Nothing,” the woman said. “It was just a hill, then one morning the whole town woke to find that old shack there.” 

“It was old even when it was new?” Blue said. 

“Oh, yes, that shack showed up old.” 

Blue and Gansey shared a glance out of the sides of their eyes. 

“And how would that even --” Gansey started, but the woman now had a lot to say. 

“Who knows the workings of the afterlife, but I’ll tell you what I reckon.”

“Please,” said Blue. 

“I reckon that there was a shack there long ago, and something bad happened there. Something bad enough to create really powerful ghosts. Different than the ones you know at Hogwarts. Maybe they died during some ritual, something dark. I don’t know. I’m no expert in magical theory. I know enough charms and such to get by, but those ghosts… they must of brought the shack back.”

“You think the ghosts… built the shack?” Blue said. 

“Oh, no. Ghosts don’t interact with the material world. No, no. I think the shack from the ghost world itself.” 

Blue and Gansey gave each other a side-eyed glance again, because this old woman’s theory did not make sense. First of all, the shack wasn’t haunted. Second of all, it was definitely solid and real. 

They prodded for more details, but this was all the woman had for them. Leaving, the night was darker and colder. With all the rush and excitement to get here, Gansey now was drenched over his disappointment. 

“Well, that was a whole lot of nothing,” Blue said, but cheerfully. 

Gansey pinched the bridge of his nose. Eyes shut he took two steps and stumbled over a rock. He swore. 

“I didn’t think I’d ever hear those words in your mouth.” 

“Well…” Gansey ran his hands up over his face, gripping his hand in his hair, gave it a tug. “That’s how I feel. Like…” He dropped his hand, swore again. 

Blue, at his elbow, so close, but not touching, “What’s wrong?” 

But he didn’t have words. Just the lump in throat equalled by the stone his gut and the airlessness of his lungs. His chest hurt, and he was overwhelmingly dizzy.

“If we never figure it out, it’s not a big deal,” Blue said. “I mean, it would cool, but… I mean, it’s about the adventure itself, right?”

“I need to figure out,” Gansey said. “I need to.” 

“Come on,” she said, and she latched her fingers around the crook of his elbow and tugged him along for several minutes. He let the town whirled around him, as he mind skipping from place to place anyway. He let Blue lead him; he trusted her. 

When they stopped again, out on the road before Blue’s house, she said, “What’s wrong?” 

“Nothing,” he said. 

“Gansey,” she said back with a bit. “Don’t lie to me. You were freaking out back there.” 

But there wasn’t a good enough answer to explain that it wasn’t the tunnel. It wasn’t the Shrieking Shack. It was about the world’s inability to provide answers; it was about his inability to find them. 

How was he supposed to figure who he was if he couldn’t figure out why he was alive?

“Can I tell you something,” Gansey said. “Something I’ve told almost no one?”

When he turned face her front on, she was closer than he expected. He could step forward and bump right into her. She had arch her neck up to look him in the eye. 

“I’ll listen,” Blue said. “If you’re sure you want to tell me.”

Gansey was never sure that he wanted to tell, but he was more sure about telling Blue than anyone so far. She was a strange being, Blue, making him both sure and unsure in unprecedented ways. 

“When I died --” he said. 

“Excuse me,” Blue said. “Did you just say ‘When I died?’”

“...Yes?” he answered. 

Blue blinked, slowly, and for the brief moment her eyelids were shut, Gansey found himself missing them and the connection of eye contact.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I don’t know what bizarro world I woke up in today if you can say ‘when I died’ like it was a forgone conclusion.”

“But…” Gansey struggled. “Everyone knows that. I’m… I’m famous.”

Something else dawned across Blue’s face, like waking up fresh in the morning. “I knew your name was familiar from somewhere. But no one would tell me what it was.” 

“When I was nine,” Gansey said. “I was at this party with my parents. Some fancy, rich, political party full of purebloods. You would’ve hated it.”

“Sounds like,” she agreed. 

“And I was nine, so I hated it too. I sunk off, as I often would do those kind of parties. Two people were arguing off in one of the halls. That arguing turned into a duel, and I got hit by a deflected curse. Right…” He pressed his hand to the center of his chest. There was no mark, no scar. All healers he had visited had said he was miraculously fine, but Gansey still felt that moment of impact sometimes. “I remember falling,” he said. And falling. And falling. For an impossible length of time. “I don’t remember hitting the ground.”

Blue inhaled sharply, but her eyes remained stuck on him. Gansey hadn’t had to explain this part to many people. This part was part of the story everyone knew, the story that made him famous. 

“They said I woke up about ten minutes later. My mother was sobbing over me.” Gansey had never seen her sob before and hadn’t seen her sob since. She was a well-masked woman, with carefully contained emotions, and an ever-stretching five year plan. 

“They told me I hadn’t been breathing. That they had tried revival spells. That --” He choked off. “I don’t remember dying,” he said. “I just remember the edges around it. And a voice.”

“Your mother’s?” Blue asked. 

“No,” he said, although he certainly heard his mother’s after he had awoke. “Someone else’s. Someone’s I never heard before.” A voice in his head. “A voice like a ghost, or a prophecy.” This had been the secret he had wanted to share. “‘By Glendower’s magic, two die, one lives.’”

“Glendower’s a myth,” Blue said. 

“I know what I heard,” Gansey said, sharp. 

“Sorry. Of course you do,” Blue said. “Is that what you think it was? A prophecy?”

“I’m not sure what it was.” 

“You know, I have a whole house full of prophecy experts nearby.”

“You think I haven’t consulted a psychic yet?” Gansey said. 

“Wager my psychics are better,” Blue said. “We can go right now.” She grinned, then it waned a second later. “Wait, it would be… you’ve already died.”

“Yes.”

Blue pressed her thumb to her bottom lip. “That’s…”

“Yes?”

 

“Nevermind. Let’s go to my house.” 

#

“What’s important to consider,” Maura said as she held Gansey’s palm spread in her own hands, inspecting the lines there. “Is that we are vessels of prophecy. Not the recipients themselves.”

“What she means,” Calla said, glaring down from over Maura’s shoulder, “Is that it’s a cloudy mess and she can’t see a thing.”

“What she means is that sometimes certain psychics aren’t meant to see certain things,” Maura said, lofty. She traced her thumb down Gansey’s life line curiously. 

“What she means,” Calla spat back, “Is that you should ask Adam.”

“Adam?” Gansey said. 

“Yes Adam. He’s quite handy with the tarot cards. This might be what Persephone had been preparing him for,” Calla said. 

Maura hmm-ed knowingly. 

“No,” Blue said loudly, where she was leaned on the kitchen counter, watching all from the not quite background. She stepped forward now. “No more knowing hums. No more vague suggestions and no-answer answers.”

Maura raised her eyebrows. “Is there something you would like to share with the class, Blue?” 

Blue’s jaw clicked shut. A minor staring contest took place between mother and daughter, a conversation Gansey wasn’t privy to. Blue shook her head. 

Maura set Gansey’s hand on the table. “Now,” she said. “I don’t believe in telling children what to do, but I highly recommend you head back to the castle now. It’s late.” 

#

“Ho, Ho, Gansey-boy. What’re you doing coming in so late?”

The grin Gansey put on his face felt stretched and tight. He was too weary for this play. “Oh, hi, Henry,” he said to the boy, lounged on the blue suede couch of the Ravenclaw common room. 

Henry's feet were propped up and crossed on the edge of the coffee table. He had a shining prefect badge pinned to his robes, but he was hardly authoritative, mostly because he was more interested in telling the professors and headmaster better ways to run the school than making sure his peers followed any rules. 

Even though Henry was unlikely to give him detention, still Gansey explained, “I had special permission from Professor Caldwell to go into Hogsmeade tonight.”

“Oh la la,” Henry said. “What an adventure. Were you going to visit that girl you’re always hanging around?”

Gansey squinted, but still said pleasant-toned, “What do you know about Blue?”

“I know nothing except that she’s the girl that you’re always hanging around.” Henry snapped his fingers. “And that she dumped a barrel of ale on some guy a few years ago in the Three Broomsticks.”

“I don’t think that’s true,” Gansey said. 

“I think it is.”

“Well… goodnight, Henry.” 

Henry gave a two finger wave and said in an overly serious tone, “Richard.” 

Up his dorm, where his other classmates were already snoring away in huffs, he toed off his shoes and tucked them under the edge of his bed. Laying down, he was haunted by the final conversation he had with Blue, after their conversation with the psychic. 

They had stepped out onto her porch together. The night in its true darkness surrounded them. 

She said, “I’m actually kind of glad you showed up. With you all up in the castle together and me down here... Only seeing you once every few months… I feel like I don’t belong.”

“You belong with us,” Gansey said, because saying ‘You belong with me’ was awfully presumptuous and he was sure she wouldn’t like it. She wasn’t an errand girl, as she had made very clear.

She raised one shoulder then dropped it, a subtle gesture under her thick coat, but he caught it. 

Then his hand in its glove took her hand in her glove, because it had just been hanging there, and in reach, and he didn’t think about it until after he had done it. When he had done it, he squeezed her hand, a sentimental gesture that could range a whole mire of meaning. It was wasn’t skin contact, but he feel the shape of knuckles in his own, a strange living structure he got to touch. 

She didn’t pull away. That had be to good sign. Blue would pull away. Blue would slap him. 

“Gansey,” she said, and the puffed out frozen from her mother, dispersing like smoke around her face. 

“Blue,” he said. 

“Don’t forget about me up there in your big fancy school.”

“Never.” 

#

Richard Campbell Gansey III -- Gansey to his friends and his associates -- wasn’t normal. Richard Campbell Gansey III had come back from the dead.


	5. Adam

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Adam really wants to solve the mystery of Noah's death

In the Great Hall, Adam slammed a large tome down on the end of Slytherin’s table at the spot where the disparate group of them usually gathered to eat. Already there, burning patterns into the wood tabletop with the tip of his wand was Ronan Lynch. 

 

Ronan couldn’t be relied on to show up to class. He couldn’t be relied on to show up in the library, like last night when Adam had asked him to. But he sure could be relied on to show up in the Great Hall. Adam supposed even maladjusted, deviant Gryffindors had to eat regularly. Maybe, with all the deviant behavior and all the Gryffindor brashness they had to eat even more than the regular, rule-abiding, diligent student. 

 

“I’ve been doing research,” Adam said. 

 

Not looking up from the work of his defacement of school property, Ronan said, “Why would I fucking care about that?” 

 

“It’s for your ghost,” Adam said. 

 

Ronan’s wand jerked an inch in his pattern-making, setting a napkin a-spark. Ronan smacked it out. Adam watched with his eyebrows raised just enough to be balanced between disdainful and unimpressed. 

 

“What about Noah?” Ronan asked, his voice gravel. 

 

Adam nodded down at the tome. He hadn’t wanted to haul the giant thing out of the library, but Ronan hadn’t showed last night, and here they were. 

 

Ronan squinted at the spine, baring the last name Granger in gold leaving, followed by  _ Hogwarts, a History Addendum, Vol.1 _ . 

 

“Some nerd shit?” Ronan asked. 

 

Adam flipped open to the page he had marked. “He didn’t die that long ago.”  

 

“We don’t even know his last name,” Ronan said. 

 

Not knowing Noah’s last name was something Ronan had only realized when Adam had asked him what it was. Ronan had just stared blankly. Apparently, Ronan never asked NoAH. Apparently, Ronan went up to the East Tower that night Adam had brought it up and asked. But, like many other things, Noah wouldn't say. 

 

To be sure, Adam wasn’t exactly impressed with how Ronan enacted friendship. Of course, Adam still didn’t know why Gansey was famous, other than being rich, but he was starting to care less about all that. 

 

“But we know what uniform he wears,” Adam said. He taped his finger down on the spread open book, where there was an illustrated guide to Hogwarts altered school uniforms over the centuries. “They’ve changed, over time. It’s not what we wear now, but I remember some of the higher years when I was a first year still were.” 

 

“There’s a book of uniform discrepancies in the library?” Ronan said.

 

“There’s a book of everything in the library.” 

 

“And what’s your fucking point?” 

 

“If we can narrow down when he went here,” Adam said, “It will really help when we go through the roasters to --”

 

“When we do what now?” Ronan said, cutting Adam off. 

 

Adam paused. This is why he wished Ronan had showed at the library last night. There, it would’ve seen more natural, surrounded by stacks of books. Adam could’ve laid out his ideas in logical order like he had prepared. 

 

“When we go through the students roasters,” Adam said, speaking slower and hopefully more comprehensible. “So we can find out who he is. Which is the first step in finding out what happened to him.” 

 

“What the fuck.”

 

Yes, Adam had gone a bit obsessive. It had started with the random recognition of Noah’s uniform and grown into a strange sort of curiosity. He hadn’t gone up to visit Noah himself, only a few times with the group. But seeing Noah, alone in his tower, murdered, with no one that seemed to care… it hit on something deep in Adam’s core. Not many years ago, it could’ve been him dead and no one caring. Not many years ago it had been him hurting and lonely and desperate and no one doing anything. Ghost and living, killed and abused, it didn’t feel so distant. 

 

“We have to find out what happened to him,” Adam said. 

 

Ronan stood from the table, the bench squeaking back. A few classmates seated at the far end of the bench squawked at the sudden movement but raised no protest when they saw who was the cause. 

 

“He’s not your friend,” Ronan hissed, and then, like the half-storm he was, thundered away. 

 

Adam closed his borrowed tome with care and took the spot next to Ronan’s abandoned one. Gansey should be showing up soon. Ronan’s temper tantrums or not, Adam still had to eat. 

 

Adam pushed aside the charred napkin to see the work of Ronan’s graffiti. It wasn’t swear words or a lewd depiction of any private parts of human anatomy or whatever else Adam had anticipated. It was, from the best Adam could tell of the unfinished work, a series of vines twisting into an Celtic knot. It was intricate and actually quite lovely, more work than a doodle, the work of some real artistic ability. 

 

He dragged his finger over one of the scorch marks, feeling the groove, then drew it back. The design would be gone by tomorrow, fixed away by magic, an ephemeral thing. All Adam would have left to believe that Ronan had this in him was Adam’s own memory. 

 

#

 

“Something on your mind, Adam?” Persephone asked as Adam slowly re-packed his bag after class.

 

“Could you tell that psychically?” he asked, standing. “Or am I just that obvious?’

 

“You’re that obvious,” Persephone said. With a little spin, she tucked a book back into its spot on the bookcase and then was back again, facing Adam. “If we don’t have a meeting planned, you’re always rushing yourself off to study or… well, also spend time with your friends, now, too.”

 

“I’m sorry.” That he always ran out like that, he meant. Professor Poldma was the first person to give him real, personal attention. He owed her more than just when he needed something. 

 

“Oh, don’t worry about me.” She lowered herself into the battered armchair she had sitting behind her desk this year. “You’re young. You have much better things to do than hang around a stodgy old professor.” 

 

“You’re hardly stodgy,” Adam said. He twisted the strap his satchel in hand and then took seat in the hardbacked chair on the student side of the desk. “You gave me an incomplete for the first semester grades.” 

 

“Ah, yes… The curriculum has moved on from the crystal ball, but you haven’t yet.” 

 

Adam pinched the bridge of his nose. “I just… can’t get there.” 

 

“I think you can,” Persephone said. 

 

She flicked her wand at a small teapot sitting on her desk, heating it, and then poured a measure into a cup. She lifted the teapot in offering. Adam shook his head no. He had tried his share of teas made at the hand of Maura Sargent. 

 

“You’re one of the best students I’ve had,” she said. “And I won’t go easy on you. I have a hunch you’ll get it by the end of the year.” 

 

“Is that hunch psychic, or…?”   
  


“It’s you,” Persephone said. “I know you can.”

 

Adam nodded, not completely satisfied. He guessed, though, it was nice to have someone else believe in him other than himself. 

 

Persephone sipped her tea. “Something else?” she asked. 

 

“Yes.” Adam shifted forward in the chair. “There’s a student who died here, at Hogwarts, in the last twenty years.” 

 

“Name?” 

 

“Noah,” Adam said, then compelled to say more, added, “He’s a ghost, in the East Tower.”

 

“Oh,” Persephone said, sounding like Adam had succeeded to knock her off foot. “I didn’t…” She set down her cup. “Unfortunately, in the long time I’ve been teaching here at Hogwarts, more than one students has died before they graduated. Not always on campus. It’s the inevitable nature of living, death. It’s just especially bitter when it happens to the young, when all those possibilities die with them.”

 

“Did you know him?” Adam asked. 

 

“Not really. He was never in my classes. But you don’t forget these types of things. He fell from that tower, if I remember.” 

 

“An accident?”

 

Persephone squinted behind her large glasses. “You think otherwise?”

 

“He might’ve said something.” 

 

Persephone picked up again her teacup, gave a cooling breathe over the surface. “You might’ve just found your inspiration to scry.” 

 

Adam blinked. “But… it happened in the past. Not the future.”

 

“Being neither living nor dead, ghosts exist outside our experience of time. Anyway, divination isn’t really about looking forward, but… sideways.” 

 

“What does that mean?” 

 

Persephone smiled behind the rim of her teacup. “I suppose you’ll have to read my book to find out,... whenever I finish writing it.” 

 

#

 

_ Dear Blue,  _

 

_ What do you know about ghosts? _

 

#

 

When Adam had first started at Hogwarts and had dedicated himself fully to the study of magic and the magical world, he couldn’t have anticipated the many distractions that would come into his life. 

 

Perhaps he shouldn’t call them distractions. ‘Additions’ made more sense, was more neutral. There was Persephone and divination, Blue and friendship, Gansey and the mystery of Glendower and the Hogsmeade tunnel, Ronan and his anger, Noah and his death. That was a lot of people to navigate, a lot of relationships, a lot of mysteries. 

 

“The thing about Glendower,” Gansey said. “Is that it’s hard to parse out what parts of his story are history and which are myth. Some of the magic involved is impossible, but… really, how impossible is impossible?”   
  


Ronan slammed shut his textbook, probably for the effect of the noise. He only had it open in the first place because Gansey had commented “Aren’t you at least going to open your books?” when Ronan had reluctantly joined them at a library study session, although with no interest in studying. So Ronan had flipped it open to a random page and thoroughly ignored it in a fit of willfulness. 

 

That was how Ronan was: annoying in every little way. He was actively and passively annoying. 

 

“We’ve heard this a million times before, Dick,” Ronan said, growling. Apparently he was in a mood this afternoon, but when wasn’t he? 

 

“Adam hasn’t,” Gansey said, looking to Adam for reassurance.

 

“Yes,” Adam said dryly. “I’ve only heard it a dozen.”

 

Out of the corner of his eye he saw Ronan grin with his razor teeth. Adam wouldn’t let himself feel secretly pleased. 

 

Ronan had made it clear that Adam wasn’t his friend. Adam had thought, Christmas break, there had been some sort of connection, then Ronan had to go and be awful and drunk Christmas night, and ruin everything. Maybe Christmas day had been a glimpse of a lonely and desperate Ronan, needing some sort of valid connection with Gansey and his brother gone for break, a spare and rare moment of sentimentality with Adam on the receiving end. Whatever it was had vanished, and Adam had enough to worry about without trying to climb some impossible mountain. 

 

“Well,” Gansey said. He adjusted the gold-rimmed glasses he didn’t wear often from the tip of his nose -- were they had slide during his reading and ranting -- firmly back up. “I don’t want to be a veteran bore.”

 

“Keep going,” Adam said. He tucked his quill back in the inkpot. “It sounded like you were really ranking up to something.” 

 

Gansey ducked his head and the glasses slide right back down his nose. When he looked up again, that’s where he let them stay. “I was thinking that maybe magic -- the impossible kind -- is more possible in magical places. I thought with… well, the Shrieking Shack obviously isn’t the most haunted place in the country, but Hogwarts? It’s still one best and biggest institutions of magical education in the world. Hogsmeade? The only all-wizard town in the county. This is a very magical place.” 

 

“That’s not in any magical theory text I’ve ever read,” Adam said. Gansey was passionate, but something his passion went right into the territory of what Blue had described as ‘Quibbler stuff.’

 

“So what?” Ronan said, in a sudden challenge, all the suddener because Adam had thought he hadn’t been paying attention. After all, he had heard this ‘a million times.’ “That shits right there in a the word.  _ Theory.  _ The greats are always pushing magic past what fucking theory thinks it can do.”

 

“Hm. Look at this,” Gansey said, with one of those abashed smiles of teasing that warm and inviting, like cushioned couch in front of a fireplace. “Ronan Lynch, magical philosopher.” 

 

Adam would’ve never be able to pull off such warmness. He was a piece of slate, set out on a windowsill in the middle of winter, cold and jagged-edged. 

 

Ronan slunked down in his seat, not as if burned, but as if melted -- embarrassed. Ronan had just revealed himself as able to have complex thoughts in subject areas other than ditching classes and compound swear words. 

 

It wasn’t much to be embarrassed about, Adam thought. There were much worse secrets. 

 

#

 

_ Dear Adam,  _

 

_ To murder or to be murdered, that is the question.  _

 

_ In other words, I sure hope Orla finds her “true love” soon and moves out, because she is going to be the death of me, or I’m going to be the death of her. You guys need to have a Hogsmeade trip now.  _

 

_ As for the ghosts ...I wouldn’t exactly consider myself a ghost expert. We have a few down in the village. Nothing like the many I hear are up at the castle. Maybe I happened to know what you want to know. We can talk next Hogsmeade trip, if you want. Why do you ask?  _

 

#

 

With matching footsteps out the Transfiguration classroom after a test, Adam was so busy churning over in his head if he had completely answered the question on the temporary versus permanent nature of vanishing charms, that he didn’t at first understand when Gansey said, “I’ve meaning to ask you, Adam, if you could do a reading for me.”

 

“A reading of what?’ Adam asked, considering if a contrast of conjuring spells would’ve rounded out the answer. If he had had the time to write it. After years of practice, quills still gave him enough trouble that he had to slow down his writing for it to eligible. One thing about the Muggle world he missed: ballpoint pens.  

 

Gansey cleared his throat. He had different throat clears. The grande ones, before he announced something. The corrective ones he used when someone, usually Ronan, said something impolite. The tired ones he had early mornings and late nights. And this one, rare enough to make Adam drag his head out of its testing zone. Gansey had cleared his throat in his unsure way, a bit timid. 

 

“Of your… tarot?” Gansey said. 

 

“Um…”

 

“If it’s a problem, then never--” 

 

“No. It’s not,” Adam answered quickly. “It’s just that no one’s ever asked me to do that before.” He had never done a reading for anyone other than himself before outside of class and practice with Persephone. 

 

They arranged to meet in an empty classroom which hadn’t been for classes proper for a couple semesters. Adam required a privacy they wouldn’t be guaranteed in the library or most other places in the castle. He arrived early to clear off a desk of dust, pull up a pair of opposing chairs, and deal out a few hands for himself, receiving a review of familiar cards. 

 

Gansey arrived precisely on time and by himself. Given that he had asked Adam for the reading after a class Ronan had failed to attend, Adam had hoped Ronan wouldn’t end up a tagalong. 

 

“Am I late?” Gansey asked as he took the chair across from Adam. 

 

“Not at all.” Adam straightened the deck in his hands, the feel of the cards corners, the weight of it, the exact dimension and shape so familiar. They were right in his hands. More right than the quill he used to pen Outstanding-earning essays and exams. More right, perhaps even, than his wand. 

 

That wasn’t an easy thought to accept. Quills and wands would lead him to a respectable career and life in the wizarding world. Divination, rewarding on a spiritual level, offered none of that. 

 

Adam set the cards down in the center of the desk. 

 

“Shuffle them,” he said. 

 

Gansey picked them up easily, but stuttered to a paused after one bridge and arch shuffle. “Is that enough?” he asked, looking up at Adam. 

 

“Do you feel like it’s enough?” 

 

Gansey shuffled the cards once more and set it back on the desk. 

 

“Now cut the deck. Into however many piles you want. Any size.”

 

Gansey’s hands lingered over the deck for a contemplative moment, then cut the desk into five piles of roughly the same size. 

 

Five. In numerology that had a variety of possible meanings, but in Tarot the five of every suit shared a unifying theme: Struggle. 

 

Adam waved his hand to continue, and Gansey understood wordlessly, to stack them back up in the order he saw fit. And so the deck was whole again, but now touched all over with impressions of Gansey. 

 

As Adam’s own hand hovered over his own deck, changed with the intention and magic of someone else, Adam realized he had yet to decide on what spread he intended to use. But beneath his hand, the cards felt like a heartbeat, alive and ready. He’d let the deck guide him. 

 

He closed his eyes and flipped over the top card. He knew it without looking. 

 

“Four of swords,” he announced. 

 

Gansey’s chair creaked. He was leaning in to see. 

 

“What’s that mean?” 

 

Adam let his eyes drift open and refocus on the actual world. 

 

“It’s not like in the textbooks,” he said. “The cards aren’t one for one with meaning. There are variations. There’s context. The other cards. Real life. What we think they mean.”

 

He sounded like Persephone right now. 

 

In the general sense, the Four of Swords, upright, was about rest and recuperation. But that was the card in general.  _ This _ was Gansey’s card. Everything in context. 

 

“What does it look like to you?” Adam said. Knowing the illustrations of his cards like he memorized every definition for every test, Adam could anticipate what Gansey would answer. That wasn’t divination, though. That was just knowing his friend. 

 

Gansey plucked up the card and examined it. “It looks like a… a knight, or a king, maybe, sleeping in a tomb.”

 

“Glendower,” Adam said, just to break the ice of it. 

 

“Can the cards be… that specific?” 

 

“There are seventy-eight cards in that deck, and only one that looks like that. And it ended up to top. So, yes, they can be.” 

 

Giving the card a little shake as if the answer would fall out, Gansey said, “But what about Glendower?”

 

“That’s why we draw more cards,” Adam said. He flipped over the next and sucked in a breath. 

 

“Death,” he said. Then with a glance up at Gansey, “Don’t worry. Death doesn’t mean death. It means change. An end of something.” 

 

“Or it just means death,” Gansey said, laying the Four of Swords down beside the Death card. “Don’t worry. Death isn’t something that scares me… It’s the living part, and making it count.” 

 

All of his assurances were genuine. He wasn’t speaking  as the role model Gansey, shaking hands with professors and politely handling the interest of various members of the student body with various virtues or lack thereof. He spoke as Gansey was, late night rants about Glendower and history.

 

But the Death card set Adam akilter. Not in an impending gloom and doom sort of way, but in a way that actually meant death, in its literal form. In the past, maybe? Or, as Persephone said, somehow sideways? 

 

Adam drew again. “King of Swords,” he announced, before it was even fully-flipped. 

 

“A king?” Gansey said. “Another Glendower?” He seemed pleased by this revelation. 

 

The King of Swords, a symbol of intellectual power, of authority, of a discerning search for the truth, didn’t make Adam think of Glendower at all, but of the boy sitting across from him. 

 

“Who’s Glendower?”   
  


Adam and Gansey both started. No one had been in the room with them, but now Noah was, sitting at the end of the desk between the two of them. 

 

“I’ve heard that name before,” Noah said, as easy as you please, like Adam wasn’t stiff with shock and Gansey hadn’t pressed a hand against a racing heart. “Who is he?”

 

“He’s, um,” Gansey said, recovering first, “An old king. From history and from myths. The story goes he was put into a deep sleep, and whoever woke him gets a favor. Maybe you heard that story before?”

 

“That’s not it,” Noah said, brow furrowed. He raised his pale hand to touch the center of his forehead. “I have a hard remembering things.” 

 

“I didn’t realize you could leave the tower, Noah,” Adam said. “I thought you were bound there.” Wasn’t that how ghosts worked? They were bound to places? Or maybe a person? Or maybe an object? 

 

“I can be other places than the tower,” Noah said. “It’s just hard, sometimes.” 

 

The tarot deck weighed heavy in Adam’s hands. Heavy and warm -- the decision made for him. 

 

“Would you like to draw a card, Noah?” Adam said at his attempt at gently. He lacked the normal charm of normal people, so it came out as quiet, if still a bit brusque. He fanned the deck out in his hands and offered them up, then remembered something. “That is… if you can interact with the normal world.” He was still unsure of the rules of real ghosts. 

 

“I can’t really,” Noah said. “But these aren’t exactly normal.” As Adam and Gansey watched, Noah reached out his translucent fingers and plucked a card from the desk. He squinted at it for a while, then turned it around for Adam to see. 

 

“What’s this?” he asked. “I never took Divination.” 

 

“The Tower,” Adam said. The card depict a tower struck by lightning, on fire, people falling from its heights. The cards were being awfully literal today.

 

Adam held out the deck further. “Draw another.” This is the closest they’d gotten from getting answers from Noah.   
  


He did, and startled at the card’s image. “Oh!” he said, and with a spark of real personality, “That’s definitely not good.” 

 

Ten of Swords. A body lying face down in the ground with ten swords sticking out of it’s back like a pincushion.

 

Ten of Swords. Betrayal. 

 

“Noah,” Adam said. “Who killed you?”   
  


Noah dropped the cards. No, that wasn’t it. They had fallen through his hands, tangible objects against an intangible thing. 

 

“I can’t,” Noah said. “I can’t.”  

 

“Don’t go,” Gansey said, as Noah grew paler. See-through. The same time as Adam said, “Why not?” 

 

“I can’t,” Noah said again, and then he was gone. 

 

The sunlight shifted in the room, a distant cloud passing over an even more distant sun, giving strange and slanted light through the dusty windows. 

 

“He’s the only ghost at Hogwarts,” Adam said. “Like a real ghost.” By which he meant the ghosts Muggles had imagined in a hundred different horror movies. Sure, the Bloody Baron was a little creepy, but that’s because he was covered in blood. Nearly Headless Nick was awfully police and well-adjusted for having his head slowly but not completely chopped off.    
  


“He is very different from the other Hogwarts ghosts,” Gansey agreed diplomatically.

 

Adam eyed the spread of cards that had ended up splayed up on the table, taking them for no way as chance: Four of Swords, Death, King of Swords, the Tower, Ten of Swords.   
  


“A lot of swords,” Adam muttered to himself. And another set of fives. 

 

“Does that mean something?” Gansey said. 

 

“Just…” Adam clenched his teeth, thinking. “Well, swords are double-edged, right? It’s the suit of decisions and consequences. Construction and destruction.”

 

Gansey sat there, quietly, tapping his own chin. 

 

Adam’s stomach growled first, interrupting. 

 

Gansey checked his watch. “We’ll be late for dinner,” he said. 

 

More time had passed than possible could’ve. 

 

Adam gathered up the deck with care, it still feeling the impressions of other people. He’d deal again tonight, the curtains drawn around his bed, a lumos-ed wand clutched in his teeth for him to see, trying to find some more meaning.   

#

 

_ Blue, _

 

_ The next Hogsmeade trip is coming at the end of March.  _

 

_ Speaking of to murder or to be murdered, Ronan Lynch. That’s all that needs to be said.  _

 

_ As for all the ghost questions, I have to tell you about Noah... _

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm back!!!
> 
> I think I got some new readers after my recent participation in Pynch Week, so that's cool. New comments gave me some new inspiration. And also I love writing tarot card scenes!!! That was so my favorite to write.
> 
> Did anyone appropriate my Hogwarts, a History joke? More than once in the HP books does Hermione complain about something missing from it, so in my world she writes and publishes some *detailed* addendums.


	6. Blue

_ Dear Gansey, _

 

Blue crumpled up the piece of parchment to hide the sentimental words. So what if ‘Dear Whoever’ was the accepted, polite greeting for personal mail. Blue couldn’t use it for Gansey. 

‘Dear’ was just too… dear.

 

Blue dipped his quill in the inkpot and started afresh. 

 

_ Gansey, _

 

She scratched it out immediately. Even just his name was fraught on her lips. In her handwriting.

 

_ Hey you, _

 

And that was definitely trying too hard to be distant. If she wanted to be distant she just wouldn’t write him. Which was what she hadn’t done since his late night visit down to the village where he had confessed all manner of personal secrets to him, and Blue had realized maybe, just maybe that he was…

 

Blue clunked her forehead down on the desktop and groaned.

 

A set of knuckles knocked on the outside of her closed bedroom door: four wraps in quick even succession.  

 

When you grew up in the same house with any number of people, you learned to recognize them without seeing or hearing them. In how they slammed from the front door, the weight and speed of their footsteps up the staircase, and, of course, how they knocked. 

 

Four wraps in quick even succession was, decidedly, an obnoxious way to knock. It announced itself too urgently in way that gave little room for denial of entry. Four wraps, also, was at least one knock too many. Three -- an aesthetically pleasing number -- paced knocks, like Maura gave, was perfectly polite. Two knocks, Calla’s signature, was wonderfully efficient. Jimi just said “knock knock” outside of doors because her hands were usefully full of something -- a rug rat, a basket of laundry, a pie. No one would or should ever do one knock, as the listener might not be able to tell if it was a knock or something else in the house being  _ knocked _ over. 

 

The only time more than three knocks should be used was in an emergency or if you were being whimsical, a la Persephone’s ‘shave and a haircut, two pence’ paced knock. Four knocks, well, four knocks was just demanding. Rude. Like the person it belonged to. 

 

Orla. 

 

“Don’t come in!” Blue said, but her head was still down and her voice was a bit muffled. The door hinges squealed. Orla had entered anyway. 

 

Blue sat up. “I said --”

 

“Calm down,” Orla interrupted. She stood long and string-bean-like against the doorframe. “I’m here to talk.”

 

“That’s exactly what I don’t want to happen.”

 

“My mom noticed that we were…” Orla flicked a finger between the two of them in replacement of a word. The reality was that Blue had been giving Orla the cold shoulder ever since she had sat Blue down to have a conversation about her prospects. After a few attempts to broach conversation with her little cousin, Orla started giving Blue the silent treatment straight back. So it wasn’t exactly a fight. It was a stalemate. 

 

“She said I needed to fix it,” Orla said.

 

“Well, if your mom said so,” Blue said, in a way that she hoped Orla found annoying. Orla, now graduated and of age, liked to think herself amongst the adults of the house now. 

 

“She suggested that I fix it,” Orla corrected. Blue just pinged up an eyebrow, amused. 

 

Orla waited. She didn’t usually wait. She usually just did. A gryffindor through and through. What was she waiting for? Blue to offer a similar peace offering? Blue to admit some wrongdoing in this ordeal?

 

Blue crossed her arms. Orla would keep waiting. 

 

“Look, Blue…” Orla said, voice softer, like this was a genuine apology. Blue crossed arms loosened a fraction. “I only said the things I said because I care about you. I’m sorry that it came across as --” 

 

Blue held up a hand in a jutting ‘stop now’ position. “No, no, no. No, ‘I’m sorry it came across as’ or ‘I’m sorry you’re feelings got hurt.’ Either apologize for what you said, outright, or don’t say anything.” 

 

For a lingering moment, Orla said nothing. She crossed her own arms, leaned into a deeper slink on the doorframe. 

 

Another standoff. 

 

“I said what I said for your own good,” Orla said.  

 

“There were are then,” Blue replied, turning back to her desk, to the parchment that been taunting her before Orla had showed up to taunt her. “Shut the door on your way out, would you?”

 

But it wasn’t over. Orla, persistent, kept talking. “I don’t want you to regret not taking chances or pursuing your feelings when --”

 

“Merlin! I don’t have feelings for Adam! Not -- not romantic ones.” 

 

The parchment of her failed letter to Gansey laid before her on the writing desk, and she couldn’t help but flush.

 

Orla, who put a lot of import on romance and dating and Blue’s love life apparently, noticed this exactly for what it was.

 

“You have romantic feelings for someone else,” she said, not as a question. She stepped into the room. “Who, Blue? Who?” she asked, urgent and interested in a way of youthful enthusiasm. The standoff had been broken, at least on Orla’s end. 

 

“I --” Denial was ready in the back of Blue’s throat, but the evidence was right there, sitting on top the writing desk. 

 

Blue slapped her hand overtop the scribbled and attempted epitaphs at the top of her failed letter, but this gave it away. A second later, Orla had lunged and tugged the parchment out from under Blue’s hand. When Blue jumped up from her chair to snatch it back, it was already too late. Orla had seen. 

 

“Gansey?” she said. “The Richard Gansey? He’s rich. Nice.” 

 

Of course Orla knew of Gansey, although Blue had made it that the two hadn’t met. Living close to the castle and having a number of friends still students meant Orla was kept abreast the rumor mill of Hogwarts. Plus, Gansey had been to this house. Surely, Maura and the aunts had mentioned it, at least in passing. 

 

“Wait a second,” Orla said. “The Richard Gansey.” A revelation passed over her face. One that had taken months for Blue to discover because she hadn’t know of Gansey’s famous moment in his childhood. Rumor mill Orla of course did. “He could be--” 

 

“Don’t say it,” Blue said desperately, and Orla didn’t. Which was a miracle because Orla usually couldn’t be stopped from saying anything she liked.  

 

“Have you told him? Are you dating?” Orla asked. 

 

“No and no.” 

 

“No and no?” Orla repeated, offended. “Why not and not?”

 

“It’s not like I can just tell a guy he might be my true love because died already,” Blue said. She ran her hands over her face. It felt overly-warm in her palms. 

 

Orla made a little hum of succession. Yeah, that would probably scare most guys off. 

 

“And anyway,” Blue said. “It could just be a coincidence.” 

 

“A coincidence?” Orla said. “Oh, honey, you are clearly not a psychic.” 

 

“Don’t go rubbing salt.” 

 

“But you like him?”

 

Blue bit her bottom lip and then answered like it pained her: “Yes.” 

 

“I’m so happy for you -- “ Orla went in for a hug.

 

Blue deflected her arms and took a step back. “No,” she said. “Just because I may have found my…” She couldn’t say it. “It doesn’t mean my life is valued on whether or not I get a man, and doesn’t mean all those things you said all those months ago are forgotten.” 

 

Apparently, to Orla, they were forgotten. 

 

“I know you don’t have a lot -- well, any -- experience with dating, so if you need any advice with --”

 

“No,” Blue said. It was becoming a well-worn word over the course of this conversation. “That won’t be necessary.” 

 

#

 

The great thing about the hill with the Shrieking Shack,where Blue’s favorite reading tree stood tall, was its very nature as a hill. Hills were the high ground, a strategic point from which one could easily see the town and the townspeople. A view from which one could make sure you were alone -- no one watching, no one following, no one coming -- so Blue could hop the fence and head straight into the Shrieking Shack. 

 

Inside, flashlight slung through her belt loop, Blue climbed down the rope that was still tied from the banister and into the depths below the trapdoor. Once her feet hit solid dirt, she clicked on her flashlight and made her way through the tunnel to its end. After traversing the tunnel about a half dozen times, the journey seemed rather short. 

 

Her intention, at first, was to spend her time searching for clues in the weeks she remained sequestered away from the boys. That had been the intention. That first time down in the tunnel on her own, she swept her flashlight over every inch of the floor, the walls, the ceiling, until the batteries started to die. 

 

But then she had gotten to the end of the tunnel and all good and noble intentions were wicked away. 

 

Today, she made no pretense and went to the end with determination. At the end was a stack of large rocks she had scavenged from along the tunnel’s path to form a stepping stool. Blue stepped right on up. 

 

Above her was the opening among the roots of the Whomping Willow, which had been widened considerably over her visits her. She pressed up on her toes. 

 

She liked seeing the castle from this angle. So long -- her whole little life -- had she seen it only from Hogsmeade. A magicless child, it had loomed, forbidden and always a reminder. 

 

But… but, seeing it from only one side and from afar had made it possible to grow used to. 

 

Seeing it from under the Whomping Willow was like seeing it anew. Seeing students out on the lawn, the comings and going through the doors, it wasn’t just some castle on the horizon, where students distantly came from and returned to every once in awhile. It was instead a living things -- a bee hive, moving in its own chaotic order.

 

Nearly every witch and wizard in the country went to Hogwarts for their education. They all had stories about their favorite and least favorite professors, of ill-gotten detentions, romantic rendezvous at hidden points, moving staircases and poltergeists. 

 

Blue wasn’t just an outside because she didn’t have magic; She was an outsider because she didn’t have Hogwarts or the Halloween feasts in the Great Hall or a view of the Giant Squid in the lake.

 

She recalled Orla, back at fragile thirteen years old, whining about the indignant unfairness of not getting to ride the Hogwarts Express with her friends and all she was missing out on. No well-reasoned arguments on the unnecessariness of train riding when she lived in the town next to school would quell her. It was the experience of the train ride, not the destination, that had mattered to Orla.   

 

Missing out. Blue was missing out. Always missing out. 

 

If only the Whomping Willow could be still, then could she climb right on through that hole and onto the school campus and see the object of so many stories for herself. Just once. 

 

#

 

The morning of the Hogsmeade trip, Blue dressed with dedicated care an outfit she had selected the night before: ripped neon leggings, combat boots, short ruffle skirt, a patch covered denim jacket -- her own creation thank you very much. 

 

She checked the clock and then ran down the front stairs. 

 

“You’re going to need this,” Maura sing-songed out from the kitchen as Blue skidded to a stop at the front door. 

 

“Need what?” Blue detoured into the kitchen. Maura sat cross-legged at the table, reading the  _ Daily Prophet _ . She shot her thumb in the direct a picnic basket sitting in the center of the table. 

 

Blue lifted up the lid and peeked inside. “Why am I going to need this?”

 

“I just have a … notion… that life is going to take you off the beaten track today.”

 

“You and your notions,” Blue said, which a hint of something sharp. Perhaps she was a little… upset… with her mother and her secrets. If she had known the truth about Gansey this entire time that meant she had known, well, the possibility of Gansey in Blue’s depressingly predicted life. It was hell of a thing to keep from your daughter. 

 

“Take it,” Maura said. 

 

Blue looped the basket and marched out, getting to Main Street just as hordes of Hogwarts students came flooding through. 

 

“What you got there, Sargent?” 

 

Blue whirled around. “Ever seen a picnic basket before, Parrish?” She pulled in him in a quick, one-armed hug around the neck. Behind him slinked up Ronan, hands in his pockets, and then, extricating himself from a conversation with a shopkeep, Gansey. 

 

“Hi, Blue,” Gansey said, and it was tinged with tentativeness.

 

“Hey,” she replied, trying for neutral but coming off flat. 

 

She held up the elbow with the basket on it. “What do you say we get away from the crowds today?”

 

It was not a long walk in any direction to get out of Hogsmeade. They head, by pure chance, in the direction of the castle. Gansey conjured a blanket on the grassy patch near the edges of the Forbidden Forest. Adam, Ronan, and Gansey ate with the dedication of teenage boys, like this was the first meal they had been offered after being rescued from a desert island.  

 

“This is really nice, Blue. Thank you,” Gansey said. 

 

“I didn’t pack it,” Blue replied. “I’m not that domestic.”

 

Later, when Ronan was distracted by knocking now empty butterbeer bottles off a fence with spells and Adam was distracted by being goaded by Ronan into a spellcasting contest, Gansey tapped Blue on the shoulder and with a little nod of the head that suggested elsewhere, asked, “Can we talk?”

 

They wandered away from the other two boys, Blue strangely tense as Gansey was strangely quiet beside her. 

 

“I was wondering,” he said, after a few minutes of nothing, “If I had done something to upset you.”

 

“No,” she said. Blue wasn’t even offended by the underlying implication that she was easily offended. 

 

“You never wrote me back,” Gansey said, posing it not as an accusation but as a statement weighted piece of evidence. 

 

“I’ve been… busy,” she said. Busy thinking of what the right things to say to him were. Was it fair to keep the information of true love from him? Was it fair to baggage him with it? Especially considering all the other baggage he was carrying from his death and resurrection already. 

 

“Busy,” Gansey repeated. 

 

“I do have a life here in the village, you know,” Blue cut back.

 

“Of course,” he said, in apologetic tones, dodging around another presumed offense. He didn’t hear the slight and subtle inflection of Blue’s tone. She wasn’t offended. She was defensive. 

 

“I’m not mad at you,” she said. 

 

“That’s good to know,” Gansey said with a rather serious nod. “Sometimes it’s hard to tell.”

 

Blue stopped walking. Gansey stopped a step later, when he realized he had passed on without her. 

 

He turned back to her. “Blue?”   
  


“I’m difficult,” she said. “Ask anyone. My cousin. My mom. My customers. Everyone in town knows me.”

 

The urge to confess had come like a lightening strike. Blue wasn’t anybody’s dream girl and she wasn’t ever going to pretend. She definitely wasn’t a proper match for someone like Gansey, treasured son of a rich, society, pureblood family. Even if she was a proper witch with a Hogwarts education they would’ve been ill-matched; add the squib part, no one would rooting for them.  

 

Yet, there Gansey was, stepping closer, into Blue’s space just a smidge too far to be just platonic, Then he said, “I may have made some observations on my own.”

 

“It’s just…” Blue looked aside, and then back at him, “Life’s not easy out there for a girl. It’s not easy out there for a squib. I have to be this way. And I’m not going to change to just make people like me.”

 

“I like that about you,” Gansey said. “I like your… realness.”

 

“Oh,” Blue said. It was such a little compliment, but it made her blush.

 

Then, like a brand, Gansey touched two fingerpads to the back of Blue’s hanging hand. She blinked; he blinked. Out in a sunny spot in the grass with no one else around, the moment hung with an imagination’s worth of possibilities. 

 

“We should…” Blue started.

 

“Yes?” Gansey replied. Had he gotten closer? When had he moved?

 

“Get back to Adam and Ronan.”

 

Oh, Merlin. They could’ve kissed right then, if Blue hadn’t taken a chopping axe to a moment. She swallowed against bitter air as Gansey’s fingers fell from her hand. 

 

It was the knowing that had did her in. The intersection of her predictions and Gansey’s death and what those meant together. A first kiss would carry too much, have too much potential to ruin. 

 

Returning to the picnic, quiet as the same way they left but in a different mood, found Ronan had abandoned the picnic for something that had drawn his attention at the edge of the forest. 

 

“Sweet Merlin, what is he up to?” Gansey asked, coming to stand beside Adam, who was watching. 

 

“Trying to cox out a unicorn,” Adam replied. 

 

“He’s what?” Blue said. 

 

“Look!” Adam insisted, with a point. 

 

At a distance, amongst the edge of the trees, could they make out the shape of a large creature, gleaming whiter than white, like pure sunlight itself.

 

Gansey swore. It was a phenomenon to overhear. But no less of a phenomenon than waiting Ronan Lynch, of all people, cajole a unicorn out of the edge of the forest and near enough for him to touch. He stroked a hand down the unicorn’s neck. 

 

“How in Merlin’s beard…” Blue muttered.  

 

Ronan looked over his shoulder to the lot of them standing a distance away. 

 

“Any of you losers want to pet a unicorn?” he said. 

 

“I do,” Blue said, marching forward with her answer. When the options were between petting a unicorn and not petting a unicorn, the answer was obvious. 

 

“Approach slowly,” Ronan said, like Blue hadn’t reread  _ Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them _ enough to annoy people at dinner parties with the factoids she could pull up unwarranted. Not that Ronan would know that or much of anything about her. Unicorns were noble and particular creatures, skittish of humans because humans just generally sucked. 

 

“And for Merlin’s sake,” Ronan added. “Walk without stomping for once in your life.”

 

If petting a unicorn weren’t on the line, Blue would’ve stomped to spit him. 

 

When she got close enough, Ronan raised a hand to stop her. She stopped. He brushed one hand down the unicorn’s neck, readjusted to put Blue on the left side of him, and he reached out his free hand behind himself towards her. Blue stared at it, as his lined palm, extended toward her, wondering what she was supposed to do with it. 

 

“Wrist,” Ronan said. 

 

Blue laid her wrist in Ronan’s hand. He twisted it so it was palm up. 

 

“Fingers together, hand flat,” he said, tugging Blue closer. “Now hold it out, and let her come to you.” 

 

He let go of her. Blue followed his instructions, extending her hand, standing, feet planted. The unicorn -- neck still being stroked by Ronan -- tilted its head. A unicorn was smaller than a horse, but it was mighty creature when it came to size. Blue was a mighty creature herself when it came to attitude. Size, no. Nor magic. A unicorn was quite a magical creature too. Did it even notice her? Was it seeing her with its pupiless black eyes? Was a squib important enough to notice?  

 

Blue held her breath. To be here, by one of the magical beasts she had read about, would be enough to make her cry in public. 

 

Her fingers twitched, she was holding them so still. The unicorn lowered its head, extending its neck, and bumped its nose into her hand. 

 

Her breath released. 

 

“You’ve been accepted, Sargent.”

 

Blue petted down the side of the unicorn’s face. “Oh.” She almost startled. “It’s soft.” 

 

“Right?” Ronan agreed, fond. Blue had never heard him like that: soft and affectionate. Blue had never heard Ronan with the same mile as soft and affectionate. When she looked over, he was grinning, a gentle curve unaffected.

 

“Gansey?” Ronan asked. Then, two breaths later, “Parrish?”   
  


Gansey approached next. Blue moved to the unicorn’s flank to give him room to follow Ronan’s instructions. 

 

She had expected a hair-covered animal to be soft, but not like this. Like silk. And underneath, warmth and strong muscle. What a marvelous moment. She would have to thank Ronan Lynch for making it happen. She would have to thank Ronan Lynch. Ha, what a bizarre combination of words she had never expected to arrange unironically. 

 

“Adam,” she called out to the boy still holding himself away, “Come on.”

 

Adam approached like he didn’t want to, stopping way to far back. Ronan gave him an aggressive wave to come forward, a whole arm movement involving every joint and muscle group from shoulder to elbow to hand. When he got close enough, Ronan did just has he had with Blue; he wrapped his fingers around Adam’s wrist.

 

Gansey bumped into Blue, shoulder to shoulder, or closest approximation with their height difference. 

 

“Oh!” he said, like he was the one startled. He was, it turned out, so entranced by the unicorn that he hadn’t noticed her as he moved. 

 

“Sorry,” he said, with a show of teeth in a bashful smile that Blue had to look away from lest she go blind or something stupid. “It’s just that this is --”

 

“Magical?” she suggested. 

 

Gansey blinked once. His eyes seemed brighter afterwards. 

 

“Yes,” he said. “When you know magic exists there’s not much that can top it, that can seem more magical than magic, but this…” He smoothed his hand down the unicorn’s back.This is magical.”

 

His cheeks were flushed, as if a little embarrassed, and his grin refused to turn back into a straight line, and oh, how so much Blue wanted to kiss him right then. 

 

The unicorn was nuzzling into Adam’s outheld hand, Ronan’s hold of Adam’s wrist still secure. Only because had torn her gaze away from Gansey again, for her own self preservation, did she see that Ronan was saying something to Adam, Ronan’s mouth moving and Adam’s brow furrowed as he listened. Strange, becaused Ronan didn’t usually conduct himself quietly. Sure, he’d muttered or mumbled passive aggressive discontent, but with no interest in making sure the objects of said passive aggressive discontent didn’t here. 

 

“Have you ever flown before, Blue?” Gansey asked. 

 

“Huh?”

 

“On a broom? It’s another experience I think is magical in a magical world.” He nudged his elbow against her arm. “I’ll take you sometime.”

 

“Like I’d get on a broom with you,” Blue said. 

 

“You don’t trust me?” Gansey teased. 

 

“Not on a broom,” Blue teased back. “You look way too scholarly to know your way around a Quidditch Pitch.”

 

Gansey squinted. “I think that’s the first time someone ever complimented me by insulting me.”

 

“Maybe the first time you noticed.” 

 

There fingers bumped into each other on the unicorn’s side. Neither drew their hands back. 

 

#

 

Just like that -- like  _ that,  _ like the length of the single syllable word -- the Hogsmeade trip was over, the boys returned to the castle, and Blue was left alone again. It was an aloneness which was all the sharper against the contrast of a few very full hours. 

 

At home, she checked the kitchen, the sitting room, the bathroom, Maura’s room, and then the drawing room upstairs. There was her mother. 

 

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Blue said. “Why didn’t you tell me who he was?” Then Blue might’ve been prepared. She might of been prepared for the dual wonder and pain of him 

 

Maura patted the couch cushion next to her. Blue went, child to mother. Some relationships were as assured as the principles that dictated magnetic forces.

 

“Some things are best when you figure them out yourself,” Maura said, in an echo of what she had said months ago. “Would you really have liked it, if I had told you he might be your true love?”

 

“I didn’t like it when you told me my true love had already died my entire life.” 

 

Maura hummed in a wordless way that seemed to concede that Blue was right.

 

She removed a deck of tarot cards from her pocket. Tarot cards were easily accessible in Blue’s house, but each of the psychics had their own particular ones, and they usually weren’t carried around in pockets. 

 

Maura shuffled them in a lazy fashion then fanned them out. “Pick a card.” 

 

Blue picked. “Page of Cups,” she said, unsurprised. It was her card. 

 

“And again.”

 

“Death,” Blue said, blandly. This also wasn’t a surprise. 

 

“Another.”

 

Blue sighed and drew again. The image of the card caused her breath to catch. Two people, man and woman, facing each other, crowned with laurels, exchanging cups. 

 

“Two of Cups,” Blue said. It was the card of union, the coming together of two things to create something new. 

 

#

 

The Shrieking Shack called to her, that very evening, when the wound of her missing friends was fresh. Adam, her first friend outside of her family. Gansey, her… whatever, the beginning of a potion, boiling over the flame. Even Ronan, for goodness sake. They had bonded today in a mostly wordless interaction, two people of actions sharing something amazing. 

Blue toed around the edge of the trapdoor’s opening. Did she really want to go down? Did she really want walk to the end and peer through the hole to see something that wasn’t hers, that she could never have? Did she really want to salt her own wounds like that, when they were still fresh? 

 

She sighed. No. 

 

So instead of down, Blue turned her eyes up, to the stairs to the second floor. She hadn’t gone up there since her first visit here with Gansey. 

 

She creeped up the steps. There was no need to creep with no one around to hear, but with the creakiness of the old wood, it demanded a careful step. Up and up she went, into a bedroom, just as torn apart as the rest of the house. 

 

Not a haunted house. Not a ghost house. The mystery of the Shrieking Shack and of the tunnel it hide where still as mysterious as they had started out. 

 

Blue touched the door frame. Who had passed through here? Who had turned this into a special place before Blue had ever decided to venture inside? 

 

Blue stepped forward and promptly found herself skidding to her knees. A warped floorboard had tripped her. 

 

“Dammit,” she swore, lifting up her hands to exam her skinned palms. When she pressed her hand back down to leverage herself up off her knees, the floorboard she put her weight on flung up at the other end like a seesaw. 

 

Blue retracted her hand like she had seen a snake. Then, thinking a moment, pressed her hand back down on the exact same spot. The floorboard came up, revealing another trapdoor of sorts, a hiding place tucked beneath the wood. In it, a bound journal. Blue lifted it out. The cover was dusty and the pages humidity curled, but when she flicked open the leather cover, the ink was still readable. 

 

_ Brave or foolish soul, you hold in your hands the journal detailing the exploits and explorations of the Marauders. Read on, only if you dare.  _

 

Blue flipped to the next page. 

  
  



	7. Ronan

Ronan would never describe Adam Parrish as a snake. Yes, he was a Slytherin, ambitious and intelligent. He was not a snake. He was some other type of sly animal. A cat perhaps. One of those cats that really didn’t like most people, would swat at you if you made a wrong move, but that Ronan still wanted to pet. 

 

That analogy might’ve gone a little off the rails. 

 

There had been a barn cat, a not quite domesticated but not quite wild creature that had lived on his family property growing up, that possessed those exact qualities. Over time, Ronan formed an uneasy truce with that cat. Ronan gave the cat space and treats and the cat didn’t hiss whenever Ronan got too close. Still, whenever he would enter the barn when the cat had been sleeping, it would lift up its head and peg Ronan with this stare imbued with all manner unimpressed disdain. ‘I might allow you to come in here,’ said stare said, ‘But don’t get comfortable.’ 

 

It was this stare that Adam gave Ronan as Ronan approached Adam’s table in the library for their arranged meeting. Make no doubt, it was  _ Adam’s table _ . It was the table Adam always went to, was already seated out, always had staked. The only people that sat their were Adam and the few people -- Gansey, Ronan -- who had been allowed into an uneasy treaty to make land there. 

 

Ronan swore he once witnessed the unpleasable librarian shoo-ing away a bunch of first years who didn’t know any better.  

 

“I hope you’re ready to work,” Adam said, today, his table piled with a precarious number of scrolls. 

 

Ronan drew back a chair in a way that maximized the screeching of its legs on the floor. He plopped down in the seat.

 

“I’m here, aren’t I?”

 

“You said you wanted to do this,” Adam said. 

 

Ronan had said that, at Hogsmeade, last weekend, when he was helping Parrish to pet the unicorn. There were only a certain range of emotions a person could go through when petting a unicorn, and they tended to be on the positive and awe side of the spectrum. Thus Ronan had taken the opportunity to recant all the shit he had spouted at Adam about Noah and say that he wanted in. He wanted to solve Noah’s murder. 

 

“That doesn’t mean,” Adam said. “That you’re going to just sit here while I do all the work. I know that’s what you’re used to for study sessions with Gansey, but it’s not going to work with me.”

 

“Alright, Mom,” Ronan said. 

 

Adam’s jaw clenched and it might’ve just been that easy for Ronan to get the cat to swat. 

 

“What I’m saying is… if you’re in, you’re in. Deal?”

 

Solve Noah’s murder and spend a shit ton of time with Adam Parrish? No downside. Of course it was a deal. 

 

“Deal,” Ronan said. 

 

“Great. Now we’re getting to work on these class rosters.” 

 

#

 

Ronan squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. He never really thought of his eyes as muscles that grew tired. It was usually the rest of him that grew tired first: body and muscles from a hard day’s wildness or mind from a hard evenings drinking. Not eyes. He never had the patience to read for long hours, even before his disdain for school had started spreading through his psyche like a mold. He was too eager to do -- fly on his broom, practice magic, run around causing mayhem with his brothers, visit the animals in the barns, pester his father for stories from his latest adventure -- to sit still for long. 

 

“Here.” Adam shoved in Ronan’s direction another scroll.

 

Ronan unrolled it and squinted down at the names, done in a shaky handwriting he was beginning to find quite annoying to stare at for hours on end. 

 

“We’d get through these scrolls faster if we didn’t keep rereading the same ones,” Ronan said. 

 

“Or we’d miss something,” Adam said. A wrinkled formed between his eyebrows as he read down the scroll. Ronan found it a fascinating spot to stare at between his eyebrows so pale they were almost invisible and over the dusting of freckles across his nose. Ronan always found something to stare at with Adam Parrish. “We need to double check each other’s work.”

 

“You think I’m going to miss something? I know how to read,” Ronan retorted. 

 

“When you’re reading a lot in one go it’s easy to miss something,” Adam said. “Now get back to work.” 

 

“Whatever.” Ronan forced his gaze away from the mole near Adam’s temple at the hairline and back to the scroll. He only read for a fragile half minute before announcing, “You missed something.” He tapped his finger partway down the scroll. 

 

“Yeah right,” Adam said, not lifting his eyes from his newly unfurled scroll. 

 

“It’s right here,” Ronan said, shoving the scroll back in front of Adam. “Halfway down. Noah Czer-whatever.”

 

Adam grabbed the scroll, brought it close to his face, and squinted at it. It was a good look on him, but Ronan found most of Adam’s looks a good look on him. It was a good quality, having a nice looking face however it was arranged. 

 

“Shit.” 

 

“I know, right,” Ronan said fondly. 

 

“There could be… This might not be him. There might be other Noahs, but…” Adam lowered the scroll. It was the first ‘Noah’ in the rosters they had found.  

 

Ronan watched as Adam’s eyes shuttered shut, like he was listening to something Ronan couldn’t hear. He knew of Adam’s weird Divination stuff. Knew of it. Never witnessed it. Was that what he was doing now? 

 

“It feels like it’s right,” Adam said. His eyelids slowly lifted again. 

 

“Normal feels like it’s right hunch?” Ronan asked. “Or creepy psychic hunch.”

 

The skin around Adam’s nose wrinkled. “It continues to blow my mind that in the wizarding world, where magic exists as matter of fact, that divination is treated like it weird or like it’s bullshit.”

 

Ronan threw up his hands. “Don’t blame me for the fucking ills of the world. I’ve only been making people ill for sixteen years.” 

 

The corner of Adam’s mouth twitched, a betrayal of a smile. Ronan sucked in a breath like he had just been punched. 

 

“So…” Ronan said, coughing. “Noah Czerny. We have a name. What’s next?” 

 

Adam skimmed his fingers back down the scroll. There was something particularly intriguing about the way Adam’s hands moved. 

 

Ronan had noticed before, peripherally, but it had really come into full awareness the day with the unicorn when he had latched his fingers around Adam’s wrist, the same he had done with Blue, unthinkingly. But then, Adam’s hand in his hand, Ronan had become very aware of it. The heat of skin. The intricate movement of joint and muscle. The even pulse twitching right were Ronan’s thumb had incidentally landed. 

 

Adam’s hands were long fingered with knobby knuckles and they were always at work, wrapped around a quill, turning pages of a book, running down the lines on a page, furling and unfurling scrolls. Deft and quick-moving, Ronan had dreams about those hands and what it would be like to be on the receiving end of their touch. 

 

“Noah is what?” Adam said. “Fifteen to seventeen years old?”

 

“Sure,” Ronan said. He crossed his arms over his chest. 

 

“If started Hogwarts this year…” Adam tapped on the scroll, up at the header, where it was dated, “We can extrapolate what year he died and check the backlog of  _ Daily Prophets  _ for news stories. A student dying, that has to make the news, right?”

 

“So we’re right on back to the search?” Ronan asked. 

 

Adam rubbed the heel of his hand hard over his left eye. “I guess,” he said around a stifled yawn. 

 

“Maybe not tonight,” Ronan said, inspecting the dark circles under Adam’s eyes from a distance. 

 

“Giving up already, Lynch,” Adam challenged. It was the type of bait Ronan wanted to bite. 

 

“Go to bed, Parrish,” Ronan said back. “You’ve got class early tomorrow.” 

 

“So do you.”

 

“Yeah.” Ronan smirked. “But only one of us is planning on showing up.” 

 

#

 

Ronan Lynch was a mysterious creature. Confusing, complex, and contradictory even to his friends and remaining family. Perhaps ‘even’ was incorrect here. Ronan Lynch was difficult to deal with, but otherwise easy to understand if you only took him at surface, only interacted with him in necessity, only saw what you wanted to see. 

 

He was an asshole, perhaps. Or troubled. Potential and talent thrown to the wayside. A sad story, but by Merlin couldn’t he get over it and act like a proper young wizard already. 

 

To the people who knew him, to the people close to him, to the people who banked effort and time, he was both difficult to deal with and difficult to understand. He was an asshole, troubled, full of unpursued potential and talent, but he was also loyal, and fragile, and stupidly stubborn, and risk-taker for good and ill, who could lure unicorns out of forests and stayed up all night in the library, defying curfew, to get answers. 

 

#

 

Ronan slapped the newspaper down on the breakfast table. Adam jerked up from the bowl of oatmeal he had been hunched over. Gansey cut off mid-sentence from some Glendower rant.

 

Adam slide the newspaper across the table to himself, eyes scanning over the page eagerly. 

 

When he looked back up at Ronan, it was with a mix of confusion and wonder. Ronan Lynch could get used to be looked at like that by Adam Parrish. 

 

“Did you stay up all night to find this?” Adam asked.

 

“I don’t sleep,” Ronan said. 

 

“What’re you talking about?” Gansey said. 

 

“Noah,” Adam said, and slide the newspaper over to Gansey. He read it.

 

“Merlin,” Gansey said, finishing the article, a write up on the tragic death of Hogwarts student from a fall. An accident, they had called it in the article. No foul play or murder was suspected. Ronan checked the next few weeks of issues too, hoping to find some follow up. 

 

In the corner of the article was a headshot photograph, a foreign version of the Noah he had known since he was eleven. This Noah was smiling, beaming and blinking up at the photographer from years past. In the photograph he looked so… alive and solid. Both of which sounded corny and stupid to say aloud. Ronan thought it anyway. The Noah he knew was thin. Kind, yes. Drifting and morose, also yes. 

 

“How do we solve a murder from ten years ago?” Gansey said. It wasn’t a challenge. It was something that hovered over all of them. 

 

Adam said, “We try.” 

 

#

 

They approached Noah together, the three of them. Adam carried the newspaper as proof. (“This was reference material,” Adam had said to Ronan, “You weren’t supposed to take this out of the library.” “I’m not supposed to stay out of Gryffindor tower past curfew, or have firewhiskey on campus, or skip class, or hex Raymond Malcolm’s broom with a hiccuping spell, but here we are,” Ronan had replied.) 

 

The East Tower was the empty-seeming when they reached the top of the long flight of stairs. But empty-seeming wasn’t not empty in actuality when in came to ghosts in general or Noah in particular. 

 

Ronan felt both Adam’s and Gansey’s eyes on him, burning and pushing respectively. They were asking him to take the lead. He knew Noah best. He knew Noah longest. 

 

“Noah?” He called. Nothing. “Oh, come the fuck on, man.” 

 

Ah, there he was, standing next to them, though he hadn’t been a second before. 

 

“Why are you here?” Noah said, held tilted, a strange curiosity.

 

Adam held out of the newspaper toward Noah, faced in his direction. “Your name is Noah Czerny.”

 

Noah stared down at the newspaper. He reached out to take it, but his incorporeal hands fell straight through. He stared down for longer. 

 

“It’s you,” Gansey said. 

 

Noah reached up and touched his own face. 

 

“Yes,” he said. 

 

“The article says it was an accident, but you told me you were murdered,” Ronan said.   

 

“Yes,” Noah said. 

 

“Do you know who killed you, Noah?” Adam asked. 

 

Noah blinked. It was strange to see him blink. 

 

“Yes,” he said. 

 

Ronan swore. Beside him, Gansey sucked in a sharp breath. 

 

“Who?” Ronan demanded. 

 

Noah placid face crumpled. “Why are you here?” he asked. 

 

“We’re trying to help you,” Gansey insisted. “Let us help you.”

 

“Why are you here?” Noah repeated, but even as he spoke, he turned away from, like the drift of the wind had pulled him, like they weren’t there.

 

Ronan stepped forward. “Come on, Noah. Whoever they were doesn’t deserve the fucking right to get away with it. People don’t just get to -- get to…” Something clogged up in his chest and he lost words for a moment. 

 

People didn’t just get to kill other people and get away with. They weren’t aloud to tear and destroy and leave behind scraps of a family hanging together by threads and missing whole pieces, and just keep on living their normal life. It just wasn’t how the world should work.

 

Noah was curled over the railing, hands gripped impossibly there. The air around all of them rasped with a sudden chill. 

 

Fingers pressed to Ronan’s arms. Adam’s. A tiny physical plea for him to step down as he stepped forward. 

 

“Noah,” Adam said in a careful but business-like tone. “Can you not tell us, is that it? Is something stopping you?” 

 

“I promised,” Noah said, a broken voice from a broken thing. 

 

“It’s okay for you not to keep some promises,” Adam said. 

 

“If you can’t tell us who, can you tell us anything else?” Gansey said, still at Ronan’s side. 

 

Noah curled over the railing further, muttering to himself, from quiet, to lesser quiet, until Ronan could make it out. Over and over again, with no space for a response, Noah was repeating, “Why are you here? Why are you here? Why are you here?” 

 

He said it louder, until he was talking normally, then talking loudly, then yelling. Adam had long ago drawn back and was now frozen stock still. 

 

Despite everything, this whole breakdown, the air being sucked cold, the way Noah’s voice seemed to reverberate from inside Ronan’s own bones, Ronan was not scared of him. Noah may be acting like no other ghost Ronan had ever run across, but Ronan was an impossible thing too. 

 

And, well, Gryffindor brashness and all that. 

 

He stepped forward. “Noah,” he announced loudly. “Noah Czerny.” He had no plan beyond that. So he said, “Why are we here?” 

 

Noah’s voice broke. His form, like fog, sunk to the ground. Whatever control he had over the surrounding climate was gone, the night back to it’s mid-spring temperatures. Adam, Ronan, and Gansey all shared a few glances with the same interpretive meaning if all in their own dialects. In Ronan’s dialect it was: what the fuckingh hell.

 

Noah silver hands covered his face, and he shuddered with a ragged end of small sobs. What could one do to comfort a friend like this. He was too incorporeal for a hug or comfort food or drink. Eventually they would have to leave, and Noah would stay here, destroyed by them. 

 

Ronan should’ve known better. He was not so strong that the wrong words about his father weren’t the fuse that lead to his own self-destruction. 

 

There was only one thing Ronan could do. He could stay. 

 

Ronan sat down on the cold stone floor an arm’s length from Noah. 

 

“You two go back to your dorms. I’ll make sure he’s okay,” Ronan said. 

 

“You stayed up all last night,” Adam protested. 

 

Ronan blinked. “I told you, I don’t sleep.”  

 

#

 

“Ronan, why’d you quit quidditch?”

 

“Matthew, why do you ask stupid questions?”

 

Matthew punched Ronan in the arm. It was hard, but not that hard. 

 

Ronan grinned. The two brothers were eating in the highest row of the quidditch stands a meal Matthew had nicked from the kitchens. Nicked was a strong word for it though. No theft, coercion, or intimidation went into the process. Matthew’s natural and easy charm meant that he was gifted with all the food he needed -- and his favorites! -- upon a simple visitation. 

 

The top row of the quidditch pitch, when on field there was no quidditch, was a long way to walk for a simple meal, but it was easier to be something closer to the Ronan Matthew had grown up with wen they were far away from anyone else’s eyes. A little bit of that tightness that ran spring-tight down Ronan’s spine could loosen. 

 

“You love flying,” Matthew said. 

 

It was true, and Ronan wouldn’t protest it. 

 

“But I don’t love having to cooperate with other people.”

 

“It didn’t stop you before.” Matthew took the last swig from a bottle of butterbeer, then tossed it up into a twirl in the air and caught it again. 

 

Ronan clenched his jaw. Before, Ronan didn’t hate people, didn’t hate the things he loved, or felt like a traitor to his father’s memory when he enjoyed something too much. Before living was blessedly easy. Now, living was like constantly pulling himself through a bog filled with thorn bushes and hornets and nightmares of his father’s cold, liveless-eyed body every time he tried to sleep. 

 

What answer was there to give Matthew -- that he wasn’t the same person as before? It was true, but Matthew was the one person who didn’t look at him as if he were any different. Gansy looked at him differently. The professors looked at him on a varies scale of annoyed and pitying. Mom didn’t recognize him or his brothers. Declan looked at him as if he was a stranger who had taken over his brother’s body. Matthew still just saw Ronan, his big brother. 

 

Not having an answer frustrated him. “It takes time away from my fucking studies? The fuck you want to me to say?”

 

Matthew shrugged, unperturbed. 

 

Before them the sky was deepening from pink to magenta as the sun lowered to the horizon. A breeze, cool but comfortable, gushed around them. Matthew lifted his hands heavenward and tilted his head bed, letting himself feel it, live in it, as it tugged at his curls. 

 

Ronan squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. Two nights in a row had be avoided sleep, other than short moments of dozing. It would hit him hard soon, whether he 

 

“It’s really spring now,” Matthew said, at the end of the breeze, bringing arms down hesitantly, as if waiting for the next gust to come along and lift them back up. 

 

“No shit, Merlin,” Ronan said. 

 

“I like spring. It’s when all the world wakes up.”

 

Ronan rolled his eyes. 

 

“It’ll be summer soon.”

 

“Yup, Matthew, that’s how the seasons work.” 

 

“I mean,” Matthew said, dropping his arms completely. “It will be summer break soon.”

 

“And that’s how the school year works,” Ronan said, although this time he knew what Matthew was getting at. 

 

“Will you be coming to stay with Declan and me? Or are you going to find away to avoid it, like with Christmas?”

 

“Did Declan put you up to this conversation?” Ronan snapped. 

 

“I have thoughts of my own, you know?” Matthew snapped right back. 

 

Ronan sucked in a breath through his teeth. If he was arguing with Matthew -- with Matthew! -- of all people, he had really driven the Hogwarts Express off the tracks, so to speak. 

 

He hunched over, elbows to his knees. “I can’t stay at Hogwarts over summer.”

 

“I’m also smart enough to know that’s not a real answer,” Matthew said. He leaned back on the bench. The sky was shifting from magenta to purple as the sun ducked further below mountains that partitioned away Hogwarts from the rest of the world. 

 

“I don’t know,” Ronan admitted. He didn’t know how he was going to face Declan after all these months. He didn’t know how he would bare leaving his dorms in the Gryffindor tower when their were no parents or family home to go back to. He didn’t know how, or if he even would, pass his classes. He didn’t know how to help Noah, if they indeed were helping him or just causing more his more pain. He didn’t know how he felt about Adam Parrish, except that he did. He didn’t know how to answer Matthew right now.

 

He really didn’t know anything at all. 

 

#

 

“Hey, Parrish!” 

 

Adam’s head whipped in Ronan’s direction. He had just exited the Slytherin common room, bag over one shoulder. 

 

Ronan pushed off the wall. He had no reason to be down in this part of the dungeons. Unless you were a Slytherin or a potions class was in, there were no destinations down here for anyone: no kitchens, no clandestine romantic towers, no library, no nothing. In short, Ronan had no excuse to be passing through. The only reason he could’ve been there was waiting for Adam. 

 

“Yeah?” Adam said, looking at Ronan the same way he looked at particularly difficult portions of his homework readings, like he was trying to puzzle the meaning of Ronan out. 

 

Might as well be blunt. Ronan shrugged his hands into his pockets as he saddled up closer. “I wanted to talk to you about Noah stuff.” 

 

Adam glanced down at the watch. “I have to get to the greenhouses and get some work done before curfew.”

 

“I’ll go with you,” Ronan said. 

 

Adam hesitated a moment, then answered, “Okay.” 

 

Ronan didn’t know how to take the hesitation. He was confident in Adam’s ability to tell him to fuck off if he was too busy or annoyed, if not in that exact vocabulary.

 

So they walked. Despite Adam being shorter than Ronan, he outpaced him. Probably because he walked with an urgency to get somewhere. Ronan rarely had the drive to get anywhere. 

 

“You can start anytime,” Adam said, as they rounded the corner and he doors of the greenhouse loomed at the end of the hall. 

 

“I’m out of breath trying to keep up with you, Parrish,” Ronan replied. 

 

“If walking gets out of breath, what else does?” Adam shot back. Ronan stuttered over a step. Was that… innuendo? Not possible. Adam had not skipped a step or breath or note. Ronan was just hearing things because he wanted things. 

 

Adam pulled open the greenhouse door with a heave and they both stepped inside the humid-warm space overflowing with green and with dank smell of moist dirt. 

 

Adam headed to a table near the back, sliding the strap of his bag off his shoulder and onto a nearby bench. 

 

“I have a few plants I have to keep alive if I want to pass this year,” Adam said. He pulled on a pair of dragon skin gloves. 

 

“What kind of plants?” Ronan asked. You didn’t exactly need dragon skin gloves to handle daisies. 

 

Adam raised his eyes. “You might want to stand back.”

 

Ronan jutted forward his jaw and didn’t move, but when Adam lowered his attention back to his work -- an innocent seeming fern in a shade of green that could only be described as ‘acid’ -- did Ronan slide himself back a length. 

 

Adam, pruning leaves with a careful dedication, said, “You can talk if you’ve finally caught your breath.” 

 

Ronan sat on the edge on the table and then stood back up quickly. “If I sit right here, will I get strangled or my ear bitten off or some shit like that?”

 

“No,” Adam said. “Those haven’t bloomed yet.” 

 

Ronan eyed the cactus beside him. “I hate this fucking greenhouse.”

 

“You’re the one who volunteered to come along.” 

 

Ronan sucked in a breath through his nose. He was sure his nostrils flared. Time to started in on what he had been thinking about.

 

“When you asked Noah if he couldn’t tell, what were you thinking about?” 

 

Gardens shears half-closed over a stem, Adam paused in his work. “Just that… sometimes people have secrets that are too painful to tell.”

 

Adam might as well of just hit him with a Stupio spell, considering the power collusion of those words. It took Ronan a minute to readjust. He couldn’t know.

 

Wait, he really couldn't know Ronan’s secrets. No, he wasn’t even pretending to. He was talking about Noah. 

“Is that what you came all this way to ask?” Adam said.

 

Ronan scuffed his foot along the floor, hands balled in tight fists on his knees. “I thought you might be holding out me. Had some theory you were brewing over.”

 

“I -- no,” Adam said, returning the shears to the table. “I plunged into this thing, but… I don’t know what I’m doing.” 

 

“Don’t kick yourself too fucking hard. I’ve known Noah since my first year,” Ronan said. “You’ve met him like twice, and in a few weeks you’re already trying to solve his murder. All these years, and I didn’t even know his last name. I didn’t even realize I didn’t know his last name. What kind of fucking friend does that make me?”

 

“The one person who noticed him,” Adam said, lifting his gaze. A slice of moonlight through the dirtied glass ceiling illuminated his face. “Not even Professor Poldma knew he was haunting the East Tower. That’s the kind of friend you are. Someone who notices.”

 

“Stop it, Parrish,” Ronan said. “Or I’ll begin to think you don’t hate me.” 

 

“I don’t hate you,” Adam said plainly. He pulled off one dragon skin glove and then the other. “I don’t have time for people I hate.” 

 

Ronan barked out a laugh. “I know. You only have time for professors and school work.” 

 

“Some of us,” Adam said. “Don’t have a family fortune and need good grades to make it once we graduate.” He slapped the gloves down on the tabletop. 

 

“What are you planning to do when you graduate, Parrish?,” Ronan asked. “Become some fucking ministry goon?... Merlin, look at that face. You are.” 

 

“It’s… respectable.” 

 

“Writing memos and kissing asses to get anywhere is fucking respectable now? Nah, Parrish, you’re too smart for that. You could really do something.”

 

“You need money to do something. To do anything. I barely have enough money for new books every year,” he said, then made a face like he had bite his tongue. It probably wasn’t something he wanted to admit. 

 

The rigidities of the Hogwarts houses had soften over the last few decades, and so had the hierarchy of the Wizarding world, but it hadn’t been torn to the ground. Gansey was still a Gansey. Slytherin still attracted a certain number of the richer and purer-blood families. Adam, half-blood, admitting to never having seen his witch mother do magic before he got his Hogwarts letter, in secondhand robes and struggling to buy his school books, had been thrown into the fire when he had been sorted into Slytherin house. 

 

Before this year, Ronan didn’t know him to have any friends. Not that he had paid lots of attention to Parrish. He hadn’t until Gansey had befriended him. Ronan had noticed him before, in passing and also noticed him in the throes of adolescent self-discovery. 

 

“You’re into strange things,” Ronan said, in a provided diversion. “Divination. Herbology. Not exactly subjects that will help you as Ministry goon.” 

 

“Yes,” Adam said. “But I like them. Divination because I’m gifted or whatever…” He said the words fast like he was embarrassed. “And herbology because I… I don’t know.” He leaned back on his bench and observed the plants spread out before him. “I like that I can help make something living thing live. If that makes any sense.” 

 

“I don’t know about fucking plants,” Ronan said. “But I actually show up to my Care of Magical Creatures class.” 

 

“A miracle,” Adam said, droll. 

 

Ronan barked out a laugh, and when he was done, he thought, even through the gloom of the greenhouse at night, that he saw Adam’s eyes crinkled at the corners. 

 

Ronan linked his fingers under a series of leather bands he wore around his wrists and twisted. “I have a theory,” he said. “About Noah.”

 

Adam gave him his solid attention. “Go ahead.” 

 

“Maybe…” Ronan twisted the bands harder, until they cut into his wrist. “Maybe he can’t tell because he’s spelled to secrecy. Like an Unbreakable Vow or something.”

 

“An Unbreakable Vow?”

 

“Yeah, you can’t break them.” 

 

“I can see why you never come to class, Lynch. It’s clear that there’s nothing left to teach your brilliant mind.”  

 

“Maybe not that one,” Ronan plunged on. He was running down a hill now with this idea. He couldn’t stop now, even to return a jib, which was a good chunk of his personality. “But something. I don’t know if it even works like that, if spells can can carryover from life to death. Maybe it is what you said, maybe it’s --” Trauma. “In that case, I don’t what we can do. But if it’s a spell --”

 

“It can be broken,” Adam said. Something crossed his face, contemplative. “If we can find out what magic is stopping him.” 

 

“Mysteries under mysteries.”

 

“That’s a very Gansey thing to say.”

 

Ronan shrugged. “When you have one friend you pick up their habits.” 

 

Adam said, “You have more than one friend.”

 

Ronan twisted his leather bands in the other direction. 

 

“You done?” Ronan asked as Adam stood, dusting his hands off on his pants, reaching down for his bag. 

 

“Yes. This plant’s just finicky.”

 

Leaving from the greenhouses, there was no shared path between to get to the Gryffindor and Slytherin dormitories other than the stretch of a single corridor. When he could’ve, when he should’ve, Ronan didn’t turn away. When he could’ve, when he should’ve, Adam didn’t say anything. 

 

“If I’m someone who notices,” Ronan dared, “What should I be noticing about you?” Although he had noticed plenty of things: hands and freckles and the every twist of expression.

 

Adam gave Ronan that look again, the one of searching and confusion and a desire to figure out. 

 

Adam said, “You’re going to have to come up with that answer yourself.” 


	8. Gansey

The difficult thing about being Richard Campbell Gansey, third of his name, was that he had to be everything to everybody. 

 

First of all was the name itself and the family it was attached to. They had a public appearance to upkeep that Gansey was an integral part of, carrying around the same name as his father and grandfather. 

 

Second were his parents, who didn’t just want his public front, but for him to be an accomplished, well-mannered son who followed all the appropriate beats of a society family.

 

Third were his classmates, who saw said name and knew of said family, who upon seeing his straight teeth and straight-parted hair, wanted him to be the kind of popular, affable butterfly that they could admire and befriend and want to be and want to be with. 

 

Fourth were the teachers, who wanted a scholar, but not the type of scholar who was eccentric, who put classwork a priority somewhere below their personal interests. Sure, in retrospect they admired pioneers in their fields like Newt Scamander, but in Scamander's time he had been a Hogwarts expellee. 

 

Fifth, everyone who knew of his famous, impossible return to life and now were waiting to see what was so powerful or special or destined about him.

 

With all that, there was very little room for Gansey to be himself, whoever that was. He spent so much time preoccupied with being all those things, needing to prove to himself that he was indeed alive for a reason, having to pay debt to the universe or the unknowable laws of magic or Glendower who saved him, to prove that he was indeed worth it.  

 

Sometimes, even with the heady weight of all those expectations, internal and external, Gansey found room to sink comfortably into himself and his eccentricities, no shame. 

 

“According to popular theory, one of Glendower’s descendants who attended Hogwarts buried an heirloom of their great-great whatever grandfather right here on the grounds, and hidden under a marker of some sort.” 

 

Ronan raised a hand over his brow, shading his eyes against the stark sunlight of midday. “The grounds are pretty goddamn big, Dick.” 

 

“I’m not saying we find it during our break period,” Gansey said. He had one foot propped up on the edge of the causeway, surveying the great lawn, green in deep springtime, which was only part of the vast property that made up Hogwarts’ grounds. 

 

It was moments like this that Gansey felt like he could totally be himself. He had told Ronan his truth about the night he had died, back near the dawning of their friendship over summer break, and Blue, and recently Adam. They might not have gotten him -- and his obsessions -- in entirety, but they accepted him. They forged forward with him on his adventures and were swept up in his mysteries. He didn’t have to pretend not to be the compelled, obsessive he was. Glendower was not a polite scholarly pursuit, it was his north star.

 

“We could be walking over it every day,” Gansey said. If he hadn’t already been found. If it was there in the first place. If the myth contained a grain of truth. 

 

“We could be walking our ways to the kitchen,” Ronan replied. “I want to eat.” 

 

“You should’ve showed up to breakfast.” Ronan repeated Gansey in a mock-posh accent that Gansey knew he didn’t sound like. He hoped. 

 

“Let’s follow your stomach, Lynch.”

 

#

 

_ Dear Blue, _

 

_ I’m writing this as I can’t sleep. I have trouble, sometimes, turning off my thoughts. They rage on and on and onward despite any of my will or wishes. I lay there, in my bed, my dorm mates are snoring all around, and I can’t understand how everyone else just slips right on under. I can’t suffer it. I’ll sneak out into the common room and get the best armchair by the fireplace (Excuse me, it’s not an armcharm, it’s a love seat ) and wait until tiredness over itches everything else  _

 

“Hi-ho, Gansey-boy.”

 

Gansey’s quill dashed an errant scratch of ink across the parchment of his letter from the shock of the discovery. He wasn’t used to anyone else being around this late. He had grown complacent in his privacy. 

 

Coming down the dorm room stairs was Henry Cheng, wrapped in a navy silk dressing down over his pajamas, hands stuffed in the pockets. He floated down the steps and across the common room with the smooth ease of a ghost, although he was entirely alive and solid and actively made his presence known instead of disappearing. 

 

“I thought I heard someone down here,” he said. 

 

“Hello, Henry,” Gansey said in a perfectly polite tone. 

 

Henry took a seat in the armchair adjacent to Gansey’s, propped his feet right up -- crossed at the ankles -- on the low coffee table set there. Gansey bit the inside of his cheek. He wanted to tell Henry to put them down, but this wasn’t his house but a shared living space and this wasn’t Ronan, so he couldn’t. 

 

“Writing a love letter to that aquamarine girl?” Henry asked. 

 

It wasn’t exactly what Gansey was doing, but it was close enough to the target that Gansey felt color rise up in his face.  

 

“You mean Blue,” he said. Which was not exactly answering the question.

 

“Yeah, that’s what I said,” Henry replied. He settled himself further in the armchair. It was unlikely that he was up and leaving anytime soon. 

 

Gansey looked back down at his half formed letter. Although there was no way for Henry to read it from where he sat, staring currently into the coals of the fire, Gansey didn’t feel comfortable continuing to write it with the audience. His thought processes, the things he was writing down and admitting... it was all too intimate.  

 

“I couldn’t help but overhear you this afternoon, talking about a hidden heirloom?” 

 

Henry finished his sentence with the upturned lilt of a question, but it landed like statement. 

 

Gansey straightened his glasses. “I did.” 

 

“I wasn’t eavesdropping. You’re just not particularly…” Henry tilted his head this way and that like trying to shake the correct selection of vocabulary loose. “Quiet.” 

 

It was true, Gansey decided as he rewinded his mind back over it. He had given no care who could overhear when he talking in the hallway or the lawn or the library or the classrooms. He hadn’t considered any of his classmates, other than the few he had looped into his small circle, could be interested in Glendower things.

 

“The thing about Hogwarts is that… not everything is as it seems,” Henry said. He rolled his head on the back of the armchair to peer in Gansey’s direction. “Do you know what I mean?” 

 

“No,” Gansey said. 

 

“Secret passageways, stairs that moves, doors that lead somewhere different on Fridays or are just walls pretending to be doors, and sometimes rooms that only are there when you want them to be…” Henry tapped his fingers on the chair’s arm, waiting. When Gansey didn’t say anything, he pushed up from the chair. “Well, I need sleep,” he said, and went back up to the dorms.

 

#

 

_ Gansey, _

 

_ Life down in Hogsmeade is dull, thanks for asking.  _

 

_ I’m now one year short of being of age. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what that will mean for me. Witches and wizards will be graduating from Hogwarts with the rest of their lives opening up before them. What will there be for me? The same things I’m already doing?  _

 

_ I want to do something with my life, something great, something adventurous. I want see things --  foreign lands and magical creatures. I don’t want that to be the last unicorn I ever pet.  _

 

_ I’m sending this letter off with the owl right now, before I can think better of it and tear it shreds.  _

 

_ Your friend,  _

_ Blue _

 

#

 

Helen Gansey had a regal presence. It was something beyond the normal Gansey family level presence. That presence left you feeling charmed but also that you owed said person respect. Helen Gansey could hex you, and you would thank her for it.

 

The way the flow of the students in the courtyard was parting like ants around a raindrop, Gansey should’ve known something was up, but only when he saw his sister standing impossibly there, in his school, did it all come together. 

 

She extended her arms and announced his name as he approached. 

 

“What’re you doing here?” he said.

 

“Do I need an excuse to visit my little brother?” Helen countered. 

 

“Yes,” Gansey said. Then he remembered himself and the company he was walking with. “You remember Ronan,” he said. Ronan made a guttural noise as response. “And this my friend, Adam Parrish. Adam, my sister, Helen.” 

 

Helen reached out and shook Adam’s hand, eyes tracking him down and back up. Gansey didn’t want to think too much about that. 

 

“Charmed,” she said. “Would you boys mind if I borrowed my brother for a little while?” she said as a question but, of course, a queen expected her questions to be deferred to. It was. 

 

“Does the faculty know you’re here, or did you just invade?” Gansey asked his sister after they were away from his friends and the larger havel of the crowd. 

 

“Please,” she said. “With as much money Mom and Dad donated in order to get you and your spotty school records into Hogwarts, I could’ve taken over the teacher’s lounge if I’d wanted.” 

 

Instead of taking over the teacher’s lounge, when the passed closer to a stone bench that Helen found suitable, she set her gaze on a pair of fourth years coyly holding hands there and said, “We need that bench.” 

 

Two fourth years blinked up at her silently and then quickly scurried away. 

 

“So…” Helen smoothed her skirt out over her knees as she sat. “You’ve almost completed a full year at Hogwarts. Are you going to come back next year?” 

 

Gansey flatten his blue and bronze tie down his front, tugged at the cuffs of his sleeves at his wrists, then answered, “Yes. I think so.” 

 

“And then you’ll graduate from a proper magical institution right on schedule. The true miracle of Richard Gansey the third. Mom and Dad will so pleased.”

 

“Is that why you’re here then? To check up on me for our parents?” Gansey asked. 

 

“No,” Helen said. “I”m here check up on you for myself. I wanted to see you in your natural environment. Mom and Dad seem to think you’ve finally settled down. You know, stabilized. They can’t say any of that to your face, of course, because you're their miracle child, but that sure does put a lot of pressure on me to be the perfect child living up the Gansey name given that you’ve already grabbed the role of the family eccentric.” 

 

“Wow, Helen,” Gansey said dryly, standing. “It’s been really nice to see you too.”

 

“There’s some Glendower connection to Hogwarts, isn’t there?” she said, not moving from her perfectly proper, legs crossed as the ankles, spot on the bench. 

 

Gansey bit the inside of his cheek and said nothing. 

 

“I knew it,” Helen said. “Well, if you solve it, or grow bored of it, I entreat you to still stay at Hogwarts until you graduate. You can get back to traversing the globe in the pursuit of knowledge or whatever once you’re of age.” 

 

“I’m going to graduate,” Gansey said. Because he was trying to be a good role model for a friend who needed him. Maybe Gansey wasn’t completely satisfied, but he did feel more stable than he just a few years ago. Becoming friends with Ronan, and then coming to Hogwarts, had grounded him. Everything since then -- Adam, Blue, Noah -- had just become more roots. Like roots, they didn’t just hold him steady, they feed him life. 

 

“Good,” Helen said. She stood. “I suppose I should ask after your studies. I have report something back to Mom after all.” 

 

“My studies are going well. I’m near the top of my class.”

 

“Good,” she said. “The only thing that would make Mom happier is hearing you found a nice girl to bring home.” 

 

Not prepared for this statement, Gansey wasn’t able to prepare his face to stay passive. Of course there were expectations for a family of his standing for good marriages. And for him, the only son, the responsibility of passing on the family name. 

 

Helen laughed. “Oh, Merlin. You’ve found a girl alright, but not a nice one, apparently.” 

 

“Helen,” he forced out, like the creak of a door hinge. “Leave it alone.” 

 

She her pinched fingers across her lips like a zip. “Our secret.” 

 

#

 

Gansey can’t sleep. Like most nights, he can’t sleep. But instead of slipping down in the common room, he slips Blue’s latest letter out from under his pillow, lights his wand with a lumos spell and reads.

 

#

 

_ Dear Blue,  _

 

_ There was something strange and amazing about reading your last letter. You put into words so many feels that I have felt myself. I feel a tremendous pressure to make my life count somehow. To make it full. I know my parents want something sane and respectable of me. And I know, before you say it, I have the privilege of magic and wealth and a family name that gets me favors. I have a lot of possibilities at my feet. But after surviving death, a normal life just isn’t enough.  _

 

_ Perhaps we can go searching out more unicorns together.  _

 

_ Sincerely,  _

_ Gansey _

 

#

 

“You and Adam had been hanging out a lot lately,” Gansey commented. They were by the edge of the lake, with Gansey sitting under an ancient oak by its bank and Ronan standing a few feet away on the edge of the bank, skipping rocks across the surface. Adam was up some tower, in his Divination class. 

 

Ronan, now free from classes and the pretense of going to class for the afternoon, had his tie untied and slung loose around his neck and his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. 

 

When Gansey posed his question, Ronan went still, the natural reaction of an animal caught in dangerous situation. Which was strange, Ronan usually reveled in his wrongdoings, not got cagey about them. 

 

“We’ve been working on Noah stuff,” Ronan said. His elbow jutted far back as he prepared for a throw. The launched stone landed with a solid, single thump into the water’s service. The angle and the throw had been all wrong. 

 

“Right,” Gansey said. They had been, but Gansey knew that the strange pursuit of knowledge could be the cement of friendship as well as anything else. “Because Merlin forbid Ronan Lynch make a new friend.” 

 

Ronan snorted. He plucked another stone from the bank and sent it sailing. It skipped three times, leaving a trail of wrinkled rings on the lake’s surface.

 

“You and Adam got over your fight from Christmas break then?” Gansey said.

 

“Parrish got over whatever he needed to get over,” Ronan replied. Eyes squinted, nose wrinkled, Ronan glared up at the bright afternoon sun as if it was his adversary. 

 

Gansey stretched out his legs in front of him. The spot he had found amongst the knobby, ancient roots served as a seat, the raised roots on either side of him armrests, the trunk like a throne’s great back. 

 

Gansey sucked in a breath. “Ronan,” he said. 

 

“Fuck no, Gansey,” Ronan growled, with a beat missed. He grabbed up another stone and gave it a vicious throw. It went far, but only skipped once. “I know that voice. I know what you’re going to say.” 

 

It was a well-worn conversation, so Gansy decided to skip a few parts to get to the point. “How do expect to pass the exams if you don’t start going to class?”

 

“Raw natural talent,” Ronan answered. 

 

“Raw natural talent won’t help you with the written portions.”

 

“More proof that school is bullshit.”

 

Ronan scooped up another stone from the side of the lake. Instead of throwing it at a low angle at the surface of the water, he chucked it in a high arch up in air. He drew his wand out of his pocket as fast as a dagger and shot a spell at the stone. Before their very eyes, the stone transformed into a sleek, black bird in midflight. 

 

Gansey stood. He perched a flat hand over his eyebrows as protection against the sun so he could watch the bird’s smooth, looping journey.

 

“That’s… really impressive magic,” he said.

 

The bird circled the lake and then started back towards them. Ronan stuck his wand back in his pocket and as the bird grew closer, lifted up his arm as if this were instinct. The bird landed with a flutter on his forearm. Ronan grimaced. Surely the bird’s talons against the bare skin of his forearm wasn’t pleasant. 

 

“Is that a --”

 

“Raven? Yeah,” Ronan answered.  He lifted his fingers to gently pet the dark feathers down the raven’s back. 

 

Gansey watched the exchange. He knew this already, but sometimes it was good to have a reminder of proof: Ronan Lynch, despite all his edges and barbs, knew how to a be a gentle being. 

 

“The thing is… school’s not all about natural talent --” 

 

“Leave it, Gansey,” Ronan said, and it wasn’t all that rough, but Gansey ended it all the same. 

 

“Do you think I can teach her to deliver mail?” Ronan asked. 

 

Gansey laughed. “Of course a normal owl isn’t good enough for a Lynch.” 

 

Ronan grinned. It was somewhere between his signature sharp smirk and that smile he used to wear before his father’s death. Gansey smiled too. 

 

#

 

“Is that sanitary?” Gansey asked. 

 

The raven pecked as the crusts of bread that Ronan had torn and tossed onto the tabletop. 

 

Ronan said, “Owls fly in here every day.”

 

“So you made that bird out of stone?” Adam said, watching the bird with a discerning gaze. “With what spell?” 

 

“You’re such a nerd,” Ronan said. “And her name isn’t ‘that bird.’ It’s Chainsaw.” 

 

Adam snort-laughed. “Where did a pureblood wizard like you learn a muggle word like that?”

 

“Is it... lewd?” Gansey asked. He knew the words ‘chain’ and ‘saw’ separately and figured Ronan had just stuck two tough sounding words together. He hadn’t figured it had its own meaning out in the muggle world. 

 

“No,” Adam said. He grinned in Ronan’s direction in a way that was… intriguing. “Actually, it’s exactly appropriate.”

 

# 

 

“Adam, can I talk to you about something?” 

 

“You want to do another tarot reading?” 

 

“No, I --” Gansey glanced around the corridor where other students were moving past them. After Henry had recited his previous overheard conversation Gansey felt a cautious amount of paranoia. He knew less people that would be interested in what he was about to talk to Adam about than Glendower, but still he jerked his head to the left and lead Adam into an empty side hallway. 

 

“I know you’re tired of this question, but you and Blue never dated?” 

 

Adam sighed. “No. I mean, third year, which was when I first met her, we kissed once. But that never went anywhere, and we ended up being better as friends anyway…” He leveled his gaze, narrowed a little like annoyance, which only made Gansey straighten his posture. 

 

“Because I’m her friend,” Adam continued, “I know that it would annoy her that you are trying to get my okay to ask her out.” 

 

“I -- what?” 

 

“You like her. I’ve noticed. I’m not stupid, Gansey.” 

 

“I don’t think you’re stupid,” Gansey said, and held himself from asking when Adam first noticed the signs of Gansey’s affection for Blue. 

 

He had found her intriguing from the moment he met her, grew fond of her soon after, was glad to include her on their adventures, was troubled when her letters stopped coming, but the feelings had occurred like the change of a season. Like winter forming into spring. It happened a little, day by day, the sun rising earlier, the air growing warmer, the plants budding then blooming. Suddenly, you went outside one day and it was spring all around you, undeniably, and you weren’t exactly sure where the transition had been.

 

“I think I’m stupid,” Gansey said. 

 

Adam nodded his head like he accepted this concession.

 

They rejoined the flow of the crowd out onto the lawn. Ronan was already there, his new bird perched on his shoulder. He hadn’t been in class today but at least Gansey could comfort himself that his friend had found something sort of productive to do. Taking care of a pet was productive, or at least not self-destructive. But even that couldn’t weigh him down right now. It was so beautiful outside: sweet floral scent carried on a perfectly temperate breeze and above, a cloudless sky that was wondrously vibrant. 

 

#

 

Monday morning, an owl marked with a tag saying it was from the Hogsmeade Post Office delivered a package right into his plate of scrambled eggs. So startled was he of his bacon into his lap, he tried to shoo the bird away, thinking it had wrongly come to him. That was until he saw the handwriting on the wrapping paper: Blue’s.

 

The package was the weight and size of a book. Her note read: 

 

_ Dear Gansey, _ _   
_

_ I found this in the Shrieking Shack after last Hogsmeade trip. I’ve read it in it’s entirey more than once. I think you’ll find it intriguing too. It answers some questions at least. _

_ Sincerely, Blue _


	9. Adam

Adam hauled a crystal globe out of his satchel and set it with care on the stone tiled floor. Ronan watched, a wraith under the doorframe, with arms crossed. 

 

“You think this is going to work?” he asked. 

 

“I think this is something I need to try,” Adam said. He sat down cross-legged on the tower’s balcony. It was Saturday and still light out. They didn’t need Noah for this, but Adam thought they should probably be in the same place where he haunted. The same place where his murder unfolded. 

 

Technically speaking, Adam didn’t need Ronan here for this either. However, for the last few weeks they had been taking every step together in regards to solving Noah’s murder. To leave him out not would be… not right. 

 

And also, maybe, Adam wanted him here. 

 

Which was the other consequence of spending so much time together. First the unicorn and then everything else that followed. Ronan wasn’t what Adam had first assumed him to be: an asshole. Well, he still was an asshole, but he was a lot of other things too. An animal enthusiast, a confidant, someone who could lock onto Adam’s humor and spin it right back, a friend, and... something else, still forming.  

 

He glanced up at Ronan whose expression had gone soft in the interim of Adam not looking. 

“If I’m gone too long or something strange happens, bring me back,” Adam said. 

 

“How am I supposed to do that?”

 

“I don’t know. Pinch me or something, Lynch.” 

 

Ronan was quiet for a moment, then responded, “My pleasure.”

 

Adam took a deep breath, calming, centering. He couldn’t think of of Ronan’s reply as anything other a combination of syllables if Adam hoped to concentrate enough to break past his own barrier and finally scry. 

 

Like he had practiced -- and failed -- many times up in the divination classroom, Adam set his loose but concentrated gaze into the depths of the crystal ball and tried to unlock his mind so that he could see and sense and be. 

 

About after a minute’s passing, Adam raised his head to say to Ronan ‘I don’t think this is working’ except that Ronan wasn’t there. When he looked back down, the crystal ball was gone, and now that he realized it, it seemed that a fog had descended and it was now in the twilight hours. 

 

Adam stumbled as he pushed himself up to his feet. He stepped over to the balcony’s railing to get a better view of the sky that betrayed all the hours that had passed. The railing was ice cold to touch. 

 

A familiar creak -- the hinges on the heavy door that lead out on the balcony -- punctuated the otherwise silence. Adam turned around, ready to give Ronan an earful for ditching him, but it wasn’t Ronan who stepped through. It was some student Adam didn’t recognize at all, but at the same time he had an overwhelming feeling that he knew this young man deeply, the satisfaction of a long friendship -- confusing contradiction. 

 

Unbidden by him, his mouth and all the accompanying parts -- lungs and vocal chords -- moved to form words: “What are you doing here?” 

 

The familiar-unfamiliar student drew a wand. With a solid swing and with the chant of an incantation, a spell flashed from the end of his wand and hit Adam the chest. The small of his back collided with the railing, but his body kept going. For a moment he hovered, arm reached out for something to grab -- for someone to grab him -- but then he kept tipping. His gut withered with the sensation of lost balance, of falling, and…

 

“Adam!” 

 

A voice cut through. 

 

“Adam. Wake up. Fuck!”

 

A touch on his cheek, careful, caring. Not a type of touch Adam was all that familiar with. 

 

Adam blinked his eyes open, sucking in a jerky breath. He was sitting cross-legged on the balcony, the crystal ball before him, Ronan crouched at his side, his hand the one laid on Adam’s face. 

 

“You back?” Ronan asked in a demand. 

 

“Yeah,” Adam said. It came out breathless. 

 

Ronan’s hand dropped from Adam’s face. Which was a pity, because Adam wasn’t yet back in his right mind to have fully analyzed it yet. 

“What happened?” Ronan said. “You just… convulsed.”

 

Adam squeezed his eyes shut and opened them again. “I think… I just saw Noah’s death from his point of view.”

 

Ronan swore. 

 

“Did you see the killer then?” he asked. 

 

“Yes.” Adam cupped his hands over his eyes. It was like a dream, the visuals fading fast. He could recall the basics of the killer. Another student, judging from his age and uniform. Dark hair. A vague notion of a face. The strong feeling that Noah knew him and knew him well. 

 

Adam recalled the card Noah had drawn at his impromptu tarot reading. Ten of Swords. Betrayal. 

 

“I don’t think I could identify him,” Adam said, even if it was feasible to find photographs of all possible students who were at school at that time. “But… I heard the incantation he used.”    


#

 

After all the efforts that had come before, the anguish, the hours of searchings, this next part unfolded easily. A trip to the library. A guess to a spelling of the word Adam had heard. A spell index that gave them a call number, that gave them a book, that gave them an answer. 

 

Adam still sometimes missed the ease of the catalogue computers at the muggle libraries he had grown up near, but he had spent so much time in the Hogwarts library that he knew its shelves, its nooks, its quirks well. There was something satisfying to skimming your fingers down a series of spines to find the one you wanted, to turn open the dusty pages, to lay final eyes on what you had been searching out all along. 

 

“It’s memory spell,” Adam said. He looked up from the page to Ronan, who sat on propped on the nearest windowsill, watching Adam at work and chewing the leather bands around his wrist. 

 

Ronan’s brow wrinkled. “Does that mean whoever it was… didn’t mean to kill him?”

 

Adam shut his eyes. Again, he tried to draw up the foggy recollection. The young man who stepped up on the balcony with Noah had only carried with him -- from the set of his shoulders to the silent line of his mouth -- ill intent. 

 

“Whoever it was,” Adam said, “Went there to wipe Noah’s memory. Which is illegal, when it’s not done for the Statue of Secrecy. And… He didn’t try stop Noah from falling.” 

 

“When we find out who this motherfucker is,” Ronan said. “We’re going to make sure he goes down, right?” 

 

Adam grit his jaw. This was a revelation that can been growing on him for a while now. The further they got into the investigation: Was what they were finding proof enough for justice? It wasn’t like Adam’s scrying vision would likely to hold up in a court hearing. 

 

But Adam hadn’t come this far not to take it all the way. “Yeah. We’ll find a way.”

 

#

 

Exam time was closing in on them in just a month’s time. Adam, who had been studying diligently all year along and the whole five years of education before, for once found studying… difficult. Was this how Ronan felt all the time? That there were more important, more interesting, more meaningful things than memorizing the right answer about magical theory or incantation lore. 

 

“If you don’t get your nose to the parchment now, Ronan, it’s going to be too late,” Gansey said. 

 

Ronan, who was tied to the table due to his need for food, stuffed an entire two-thirds of a roll into his mouth to avoid having to respond. What response was there for Ronan to give that he hadn’t already given. The ‘fucks offs’. The ‘whatever Dicks’. The ‘school is just a scam shaping us workers complicent in the system.’

 

This conversation had been rehashed a lot lately, over almost every meal. In some ways, Adam had noticed, Gansey had appointed himself Ronan’s keeper. 

 

“What will you do with yourself if you don’t graduate from Hogwarts?” Gansey posed. It was a flimsy question. Both Adam and Gansey knew Ronan well enough to see that he revealed in alternating phases of lazing about and random reckless behavior. 

 

Ronan managed to swallow his literary mouthful somehow just so he could get out this witty comment. “I don’t know, Gansey. What will I do when I turn seventeen over summer and get access to my inheritance?”

 

Adam’s knife screeched against the plate as he pressed down to hard. The downside of obscenely rich friends, they made comments like this. They had fall back plans because they had absurd amounts of money to live off of and follow their dreams. First year, Adam Parrish had spent this little spare pocket money on ink so he could practice his handwriting with a quill until his fingers ached and his professors stopped commenting on the ink spots and the messy scrawl.

 

“Don’t you want to come back to Hogwarts next year?” Gansey said.

 

The corner of Ronan’s eye twitched. This was a more complicated question. Ronan may have hated the school part of Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but Hogwarts was more than a place where one went to take lessons and exams. For Adam, it was a school, but not like any school before this -- where he found his own talents and was acknowledged. A place where he had made friends. A place where he felt safe. 

 

One more summer. That was all Adam had left to endure. One more summer back at the hell of the trailer he had grown up in, and then he would be ready to forge out in the world all on his own. 

 

“You do,” Gansey said. 

 

“You’ve been at Hogwarts for one fucking year,” Ronan said. “You don’t get to talk.”

 

“I’ve traveled all over,” Gansey said. “I’ve gone to different schools, been homeschooled, did correspondence classes, and this is the first place I’ve felt… right.”

 

A few months ago, Adam would’ve found it difficult to believe someone like Gansey -- good family, moneyed, well-educated, well-liked, effortlessly charming -- could feel misplaced. Adam had lived his entire life as an outsider, except maybe less this school year. But now, knowing Gansey more, having seen him late nights, glasses on and hair messed up, rubbing tired eyes, his words turning to the truth of him as opposed to the careful veneer. 

 

Gansey had told Adam about his death. It had happened one night where they had been studying together and the studying turned into the type of conversation people had in the late nights, where you felt safer in the dark telling secrets, tired enough to be be disconnected from the consequences of confessions. So Gansey had told Adam, about dying, about the voice he heard, and his lasting desperate need that grew from deep in his guts to find answers and create meaning. 

 

Adam had no use for answers in his life, but meaning he could strive for, as long as it came with a decent paycheck.  

 

Ronan gnawed on his bracelets. He was like that often, suddenly nonverbal. Maybe he would kick over a suit of armor later to express himself. Instead of annoyed, Adam found the corner of his mouth twitching up. 

 

#

 

“Here you are,” Gansey said, snapping a slip of parchment between two sets of pinched fingers like a miniature banner. “One teacher’s note to get into the Restricted Section.”

 

Adam might’ve been able to rustle up a note like that on his own being the academically inclined, advanced student he was, but it was so much easier to let Gansey do the schmoozing.

 

Being one of the few students the librarian actually seemed less tortured about allowing to touch her books, Adam was the one to deliver it to the front desk. 

 

“ _ Memory and Manipulations,” _ she croaked, reading the title with narrowed eyes. 

 

“I’m doing research,” he said. 

 

“For what class?”

 

Adam hesitated a giveaway moment. “Charms?” he answered.

 

The librarian went off to retrieve the book, muttering about what students were taught these days; she returned a few minutes later, handing over the volume. Well, half handed it over. It was laid in Adam’s hands, but she had yet to let go of her grip. 

 

“They’re dangerous work,” the woman said, “Memory spells. Taking away someone’s memory is taking away their ability to make informed choice. In my opinion, they should be unforgivables.” 

 

Adam tried to nod, but her jaw was so stiff it was just a twitch. 

 

“What a coincidence,” Gansey said, standing just beyond Adam’s shoulder. “That’s exactly what his research is about.” 

 

The librarian’s lips pinched, but she let go. 

 

Gansey placed his hands Adam’s shoulder and guided him away before he could say something stupid, and out of the library. 

 

“Keep walking before she changes her mind,” Gansey whispered. 

 

#

 

The memory spell that Noah had been hit with hadn’t been a wiping spell, but a locking spell. The memories were stuck in Noah’s mind, bound up, but that he couldn’t speak or otherwise communicate. 

 

“But is there a way to break it?”

 

Ronan hovered over Adam’s shoulder, with Gansey at his elbow. 

 

Adam flipped to the next page, scanning the long list of instructions in minuscule print. “Yes.” he said. “It’s complicated. But yes.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks for the lovely comments people. They've been keeping me inspired even when I'm struggling with this story.


	10. Everyone

“How sure are that this going to work?” Ronan asked, squinting at the tree, waving its club-like limbs in the air. “Regardless how I feel about Sargent, I don't want her head whomped off.”

 

It was dusk. This was strategic. Most of the student population was tucked away in the Great Hall and thus not outside or looking outside. Dark would give them cover soon but right now they had just enough light for this risky portion of the plan.

 

“It’s what the book said,” Gansey said.

 

“You're going to just follow and trust what some old book says?” Adam pondered.

 

“All you do is follow what old fucking books say,” Ronan said. He nudged Adam with his elbow to emphasize.

 

“We need to find the knot that will freeze the tree.” Gansey raised the journal that was serving as their guide. The journal contained the story of four friends who had attended Hogwarts decades ago:a werewolf and three Animagi. The Shrieking Shack had been built to contain the werewolf during the full moon and the tunnel used by the friends who learned to be an Animagi to accompany him. The story was told under nicknames so the answer of the journal posed another series of mysteries, but Gansey would hold off on those until much later. Noah mattered first.

 

That was this group of friends: three wizards, a squib, and a ghost.

 

“Blue’s trusting we can do this, so we have to do this.”

 

Gansey scanned the pages of the journal again.

 

“Can we just stun it?” Ronan asked.

 

Above where the three of them stood -- a comfortably safe distance from the Whomping Willow -- Chainsaw circled overhead, occasionally cawing. If it hadn’t been Ronan’s bird, it would’ve been a downright ominous sign, an omen telling that her plans were doomed. Knowing it was Ronan’s bird didn’t completely absolve the image of the raven circling and swooping of its eeriness.

 

“Stun a giant, magical tree?” Adam asked. “Pretty high opinion of yourself, huh?

 

“We could spend a spell at the knot though.” Gansey tapped the page. “It should be right under that big gnarly root there…. Ronan, if you’ll do the honors.” Ronan tended to have the best aim with spells.

 

Ronan shot a couple spells to no results. Adam followed with a few attempts, then Gansey.

 

“Are you sure we’re aiming at the right spot?” Adam asked. He scratched the hair at the back of his head.

 

“There’s a diagram, see?” Gansey tilted the journal in Adam’s direction to show the rough sketch of the Whomping Willow on the page.

 

“How did they do it?” Adam said.

 

“One of their friends turned into a rat and was able to run under the branches.”

 

“Who wants to become an animagus in the next five minutes,” Ronan deadpanned.

 

“We could find a really long stick?” Adam said.

 

“So get looking,” Ronan said.

 

Gansey sighed. It certainly would be easier if one of them could turn into a small animal but that wasn’t going to be happening tonight. Having a small animal that could do their bidding would also be useful.

 

Chainsaw cawed overhead.

 

Once Ronan was convinced of it, once Chainsaw landed on Ronan’s held out arm, once Ronan talked to Chainsaw like any wizard would talk to their owl, knowing they were magical creatures that understood more than a mundane animal, once all that… Chainsaw took flight. She fluttered careful and low, around and under batting branches, and landed on the trees roots. She started peaking around in the general area of the supposed knot that, when pushed, would freeze the willow. After a minute of attempts, Chainsaw found her mark. The Whomping Willow went into sudden rigor mortis, stiffening and stilling. Chainsaw flew away with ease, no branches swinging at her.

 

It had gone from dusk to twilight. The sun was set, only the edges of its light pushing back over the horizon.

 

The three boys walked up to the tree’s trunk, but not without a few stuttering steps at the shift of shadows and suspicious glances up at its frozen branches.

 

“All clear, Blue!”

 

Her head popped out between the roots. Gansey offered a hand up. She took it. His entire hand felt like it was on fire.

 

“Took you long enough,” she said, once she had both feet planted above ground.

 

“Next time we’ll let it whomp you, Sargent,” Ronan said, but it was on the fonder side of his viciousness. And Blue just grinned, her grin almost sharp as one of Ronan’s own.

 

“How about not hang out under this tree,” Adam said.

 

“Good point,” Gansey said, complete with actually jabbing a little point in Adam’s direction, but that was the last thing said before they scurried their way safely away from the reach of the branches.

 

Seeing Blue, having the group of the them reunited, their was a swimming joy bubbling up in Gansey’s head worse than champagne, but they still had work to do tonight.

 

#

 

Blue Sargent knew very well that she was short and that the Hogwarts castle was tall. Any structure that looked big even at a distance would’ve of course been immense, but none of that knowledge -- factual, observed, understood -- had any meaning when she was standing before the front doors, with her neck craned upward. The building just went up and up and up farther than she could see.

 

A hand -- Gansey’s -- settled on her elbow and guided her forward through the front doors. She knew it was Gansey’s hand just from the touch, how tentative the fingers settled on her sleeve like she was a cat he was afraid would scratched if petted wrong. He touched her like he wasn’t sure his touch was welcome, was wanted, was something that Blue daydreamed over: their fingers bumping on the unicorn’s back, his arm brushing against hers as they walked side-by-side, and sometimes even some touches more deliberate.

 

Which was the more overwhelming feeling: Gansey’s fingers lingering or stepping into the entrance hall of the castle forbidden for her?

 

“This way,” Ronan said, and the lot of them hustled down a twisting path of corridors followed by staircases followed by a pathway hidden behind a tapestry. Ronan was given deference as the leader here, as Gansey explain into her ear, because he was the one most familiar with sneaking around the school after hours.  

 

Finally, after a long march up a long circling staircase in single file, they reached atop the east tower, the home of the ghost named Noah that Blue had heard so much about. He was why they were here tonight. Why she was here.

 

Even after Blue had read how to still the Whomping Willow in the Marauder's journal, it hadn’t ignited some flame in her to sneak into Hogwarts. She was too sensible for that. It wasn’t like, her whole life, she couldn’t just walk up to the gates and demand to visit Persephone, or have Persephone give her tour. Blue had decided, her whole life, that if she couldn’t go to Hogwarts the way she is supposed to, as a full-fledged witch, she didn’t want to step in at all. Perhaps that was petty stubbornness.

 

It definitely was petty stubbornness.

 

So she was here for Noah. For Gansey and Adam and even Ronan, sure. But for Noah, a friend she had never met. A friend by association.

 

It pure nighttime when they reached the tower’s balcony. The sky was black and speckled with stars. The boys lit their wands for light, Adam moving down the stretch of the wall, setting bracketed torches alight.

 

“You’re new,” said a voice -- not one of her boys’ -- behind her. She whirled around to see tissue-thin looking boy that must’ve been Noah.

 

“I’m Blue,” she said evenly. Witch or not, growing up in a house full of psychics made her used to the strange.

 

“Blue?” the ghost-boy repeated with eyes growing wide.

 

“...Yes?”

 

“Blue, Blue, Blue.” He cocked his head. “I like it. Blue.”

 

“And you’re Noah, I presume.”

 

He nodded, but his gaze drifted over his shoulder. “Is everyone up here for me?”

 

She reached out and touched his arm. He was a thin, cold, nothingness that her fingers fell straight through, but his gaze shot straight back to her on contact.

 

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, we are.”

 

#

 

Now that the lot of them were all up in the east tower, Ronan stood to the side as he watched the others work. Down on his knees, Adam drew a carefully measured pentagram out on the stone, a piece of chalk clutched in his fingers, the powdery dust of it covering his finger tips. Gansey was reviewing the instructions in _Memory and Manipulations_ and making sure all their supplies -- a flint, ground dragonstooth, flaxweed, lilac -- were ready and measured out correctly. Blue was chatting up Noah, who was in a rather affable mood. His eyes had gone coin-like the moment Noah had seen her.

 

Gansey tucked the spellbook under his arm and sidestepped next to Ronan. “How long do you think it has been since he’s talked to a girl?” he asked affably of the sight before them. It was well-meaning, but it still settled wrong in Ronan’s stomach.

 

“It’s not making you jealous, is it?” Ronan shot back, unfairly.

 

He was lucky that the night was too busy for Gansey to dig into that statement for hidden meaning.

 

Adam sat back on his heels, clapping his hands together to dust them off. “Ready?”

 

Ronan strode forward and took his seat at one of the pentagram’s points.

 

One by one, the other four took their seats, Adam to one side of Ronan, Blue to the other, then Gansey, then Noah. And so their circle - pentagram - whatever was complete.

 

Adam worked his hands over a mortar and pestle, grinding the ingredients Gansey had checked just moments ago into a fine powder and then dumped them in a pile in the center of the pentagram. Blue leaned forward to light the pile with a flint and knife. The spell demanded normal fire -- earth’s fire, as the pages had called it -- not magic fire.

 

Gansey raised his wand and cast the enchantment. So the setting for the curse-breaking was complete. Everyone had done their part, while Ronan had watched.

 

“All right,” Adam said. “We all prepared for this part. To free Noah’s memory, we each have to share one of our own secrets. The book said, ‘one you’ve kept locked up tight.’” Adam’s shoulder rose and sunk in an all bodied sigh. “I’ll go first.”

 

Ronan watched him at an angle, in profile, not willing to watch him openly with so many around.

 

“My dad hits me,” Adam said.  

 

It landed with a thud, like a sour note banged on a off-tune piano. In the middle of the pentagram, the orange fire glared purple.

 

“Adam…” Blue said, dragged and said. Had she not known? Ronan had thought them best friends, stuck in each other’s confidence.

 

Everyone was staring at Adam, so Ronan felt licensed to stare too. The skin around Adam’s eyes was tight.

 

“We don’t have for this right now,” Adam said, words clipped. “We need to keep going. Ronan. Your turn.”

 

Ronan released a hissing breath between his teeth as eyes shifted to him.

 

“Ronan.” Adam had just chanted his name again.

 

Ronan stared in the fire, now returned to orange. His vision blurred as his vision crossed, staring into the flame and past it all the same.

 

“I know why my dad was murdered,” he said. Across from him, Gansey took in a sharp breath. The fire stayed the same.

 

“You need to say more,” Adam whispered.

 

Adam had said several words less, and the spell had accepted it. But like it all things, Adam had been succinct and brutally accurate. Ronan had chosen vague words, still hiding.

 

“He could do stuff… stuff with magic that supposed to be impossible. Make stuff... I can do it too.”

 

The fire went purple.

 

Ronan threw out an elbow. “Your turn, Sargent.”

 

She cleared her throat. “There’s a prophecy, from my aunts and mom, about me. That my true love would die before I met him.”

 

The fire flared purple again, accepting this sacrifice.

“Gansey,” Adam said. “You next.”

 

Gansey rubbed his hand over his perfect hair, making it unperfect. Ronan was genuinely curious as to what Gansey would have to say. He had already shared with all of them his big secret: his death and the voice he heard in it.

 

“The reason I transferred to Hogwarts, the reason I wasn’t here from the start… after what happened to me…” Gansey heaved a breath. He was choking on words. From beside him, Blue reached out and took his hand. Ronan watched as Gansey curled his fingers firmly around hers. Merlin hell, so that, Gansey-and-Blue, Blue-and-Gansey, was an actual thing.

 

“Being around magic, especially lots of it, would…” He grimaced over his words. “Would freak me out. I tried schools and had to leave. My parents hide it, of course, but I I’d have panic attacks, hide in room, or run away, whatever worked to make me feel like I could breathe. This is the first I’ve ever been able to stay.”

 

Anyone who had been true confidants with Gansey knew who he revealed himself to be when the varnish wore off, but this was another surface level of Gansey being worn away. He was a fractured core like the rest of the them.

 

The fire burned purple a final time.

 

They waited for the next person in their circle to speak. The ghost. The one they had done this all for: had torn our their guts and revealed them. Noah sat with his hands sunk in his lap, chin and eyes down.

 

“Noah,” Ronan said, kind of a croak.

 

Noah lifted his chin, but not his eyes. Ronan understood. He had a hard time looking at anyone directly right now himself.

 

“Whelk,” Noah said. “Barrington Whelk.” The air itself sizzled. “We were supposed to be friends. It supposed a bit of fun. We weren’t supposed to actually find anything.”

 

Ronan sensed more than saw Adam shift beside him and Gansey twitch where he sat. Adam was obsessed with solving this, and Gansey was obsessed with finding.

 

“A girl I liked left me a note to meet her up here, on the east tower,” Noah continued. “I was waiting for her when Whelk showed up.” Noah squeezed his eyes shut hard and reopened them. “What are you doing here,” he said, his voice now the echoes of every time each of them had heard him say it: his last living words.

 

“He hit me with the spell, and I tripped back. I saw his face, right before I fell. It wasn’t shocked or sorry or anything.”

 

“Oh, Noah,” Blue breathed.

 

“... He was the one that wrote the note, wasn’t he?” Noah asked.

 

“Yeah, probably,” Ronan said.

 

Noah rubbed at the back of his neck. The fire, burned down to just a tiny flame, glowed reflective orange in his eyes.

 

“All these years,” he said. “And I just figured that out.”

 

#

 

The porch steps leading up the front door of Blue’s house creaked under the combined weight of their feet. Blue hugged her arms around herself.

 

“Good thing it’s a mild night,” she said. She meant the weather. Otherwise, the night had been emotionally brutal.

 

“Yes, mild,” Gansey said back. They had just walked down the hill from Shrieking Shack and into town. He had volunteered to accompany her back home. It had been a wordless volunteering, just all the places he could’ve turned back he instead kept walking at her side. She said nothing of it either.

 

The front door opened inward. Professor Poldma stood in its silhouetting light. Gansey stiffened. He he was caught in a position compromising by someone who was both a school authority and a parental figure of Blue’s.

 

“You can sleep on the couch,” she said to Gansey. “I’ll write you a note in the morning. But first… tea.”

 

The pair of them were ushered inside and into the kitchen where a kettle was already squealing and Maura was already selecting tea leaves.

 

“Ah, yes,” she said, taking a whiff from one tin. “This one. For emotional fortitude.”

 

“I like your family,” Gansey said, taking a chair.

 

Blue said, “Reserve that statement until after you try the tea.”

 

The tea ended up benefit fairly bitter, but drinkable with enough sugar mixed in.

 

“It’s late. You should go to bed,” Maura said, after their cups were emptied.

 

“I thought you didn’t believe in telling child what to do,” Blue countered, which to Gansey’s ear seemed like an awfully bold thing to say to your parent.

 

“I said ‘should’,” Maura said. “That means it’s optional.” She yawned, largely, exaggerated. “I’m going to bed.”

 

“Goodnight then,” Blue said, as firmly as a hammer hitting a nailhead.

 

Left alone, Gansey didn’t know how to proceed. He straightened his teacup so that it was aligned to an old ring already stained into the tabletop.

 

“Let me show you where you are sleeping,” Blue said, her chair scratching back. The pixies in Gansey’s stomach were unnecessary. He knew where he was sleeping; he had sat on that couch before.

 

Blue took his hands in hers. The pixies went wild and his mind went to fuzz. His brain started functioning again once they both were sitting side by side on the couch. Blue had only turned on a single lamp on the way in, and the room glowed with an yellow light but was defined by stronger shadows.

 

“You said tonight… about a prophecy?”

 

Every other confession tonight had been a cruciatus, but Blue’s, once Gansey had bounced around in his mind, had been elation.

 

“Yes,” Blue said.

 

He squeezed her fingers.

 

“All my life,” she said, “I thought I wouldn’t…” she sighed.

 

“I’ve already died,” Gansey said.

 

“I know,” Blue said, another hammer, another nail.

 

He turned to look at her in profile: the roundness of her cheek, the spikiness of her hair under a mishmash of clips, the slope of her nose. All her shapes and lines more lovely set in the harsh contrast of the angled light.

 

“You’ve been thinking about this since I told you about it,” he said.

 

Blue turned to look him in the eye. “Yes.”

 

“Blue…” It actually hurt to say her name, because all his feeling contained were on edge of explosion.

 

“I know it’s a lot to put on anyone’s shoulders. I don’t want you to feel obligated to --”

 

“Blue,” he said again. “When I can’t sleep, I read your letters.”

 

At sixteen, he didn’t think he knew enough to know how to define the contours of true love. After all, centuries of poets had tried, and Gansey was just one boy, but he knew this. When he couldn’t sleep, he read her letters.  

 

Her breath fluttered. “Oh.”

 

“I want to kiss you.”

 

“That’s… that’s agreeable.”

 

In this lighting, Gansey wasn’t sure if she was blushing, but he thought she was.

 

He leaned in, and they met in the middle, noses bumping, his lips landing on the corner of her mouth. They tilted back, forehead to forehead, with a huff and giggle.

 

Blue said, “Let’s try that again.”

 

#

 

“It isn’t over,” Ronan said. He took a swig from a bottle of firewhiskey.

 

Adam eyed the bottle, the liquor inside that took after its name: a shifting, dangerous shade of flame. Dangerous to touch.

 

Ronan had it stashed behind a loose brick on the balcony, apparently his common drinking place.

 

“I know,” Adam said. “How much does a ghost’s eyewitness account meant in wizard court?”

 

Ronan made a grunty noise in descending pitches, the suggestion: _I don’t know._

 

Ronan held out the bottle in offering. Adam shook his head no.

 

“I don’t drink,” he said, which was more than an admittance than just refusing one drink at one time.

 

Ronan drew back the bottle. After a finite pause, he said, “Your loss.”

 

It was a blessing, not to be asked why.

 

“If the department of magical law enforcement or whoever the fucking else doesn’t do anything, we’ll do something.”

 

Adam thought he had figured out the edges of Ronan’s characters. Gratuitous swearwords, skipping class, and getting into magical duels with douches that mostly deserved it. But he was also fiercely loyal to his friends. How far would that push him? What unknown limits defined and shaped him?

 

“How?” Adam said.

 

“Your top of the class,” Ronan said. “And I can do impossible things with magic.” He kicked Adam’s foot from where their legs were stretched out near each other’s. “We’ll figure something out.”

  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I was super excited to write and now post this chapter. I've been working up to this point for a while and I hope you all enjoy it as much as I have.


	11. Gansey

With his secret-keeping spell broken, Noah made himself much more known. In the corridors, in the library, one notable time when Ronan had been in a half-sleep in his dorm room and had ended with a small fire and a prefect intervention. 

 

“He’s annoying,” Ronan dropped one morning over breakfast, when they were all putting forth their stories of different places Noah had popped up and startled them. 

 

“He’s your friend,” Adam said. 

 

Ronan, with dark circles under his eyes, slumped over his bowl of oatmeal, had no more pretense to give than usual. 

 

“I find you all annoying,” he said. “You’re just less annoying than everyone else.” 

 

“True friendship, defined,” Gansey deadpanned. “And we should give Noah a break. Being able to speak freely for the first time. It must be such a weight of his chest, admitting that secret.” 

 

Gansey heard it as soon as he said it, and it silenced all three of them from further conversation. None of them had dared try to talk about the secrets the other’s had admitted. Gansey would usually be the first to pursue Ronan into uncomfortable personal topics, because someone needed to have expectations of him. The world, it seemed, had given exasperatedly up on him. Gansey wouldn’t. Of course, what Adam had admitted was horrifying as well. And Gansey had already gotten approval from his mother to have friends stay over for the summer break, an offer for Adam and Ronan, if only he could broach the topic with either of them. 

 

It was a perilous situation. All of them had dirt on the other. They weren’t the type of friends to use that to hurt the others or spread rumors, but any attempt to start a serious conversation could be deflected with a serious conversation back. Since the spell, since baring their secrets, Gansey guessed they were all feeling a little raw. He knew he was. To bear being in each other’s company meant pretending everything was flowing onward the same. 

 

“You’re all in different houses, why are you sitting at the same table?” 

 

Gansey blinked. Noah was there, sitting beside him. Gansey wasn’t sure when he had arrived, for her certainly hadn’t been there just a few minutes ago when they all had been talking about him behind his back. Gansey would’ve never been so crase to do that where Noah could overhear. Yet here Noah suddenly was, present. 

 

“Because we fucking feel like it,” Ronan grumbled. 

 

“While those wouldn’t be the exact wording I’d chose, the sentiment is correct,” Gansey said. 

 

Adam rolled his eyes. “No one’s told us to stop yet.”

 

“I sat over there,” Noah said, jutting his thumb over his shoulder, which could’ve indicated any of the the three tables behind him. “With me here, you have a complete set.” He pointed to Adam. “Slytherin.” To Ronan. “Gryffindor.” To Gansey. “Ravenclaw.” To himself. “Hufflepuff.” 

 

“You’re a Hufflepuff?” Ronan said. “Figures.” 

 

A second later, Ronan yelped and jerked splendidly, knocking over a goblet of pumpkin juice. 

 

Adam shifted away from him on the bench. “Merlin -- What’s wrong with you?”   
  


“Noah kicked me under the table. It felt like my leg had just plunged into the frozen lake.” 

 

“You should know better than to talk shit about someone’s house, Lynch,” Adam said. He drew out his wand and cast a quick spell that dried up most of the spilled juice. 

 

“Maybe it’s because I’m a latecomer,” Gansey said. “But I never got what the big deal with houses and the rivalries is.”    

 

“It’s not about the rivalry, it’s about the identity,” Adam said.

 

Ronan cut in over the end of Adam’s sentence. “I’ll give you the rundown, Dick. Ravenclaws are the nerds. Hufflepuffs are the weirdos. Slytherins are the other weirdos. Gryffindors are the best at Quidditch.”

 

Adam scoffed. “You wish.” 

 

“When the fuck did you start caring about Quidditch, Parrish?” 

 

“When you started lying, Lynch,” Adam said. “Are you sure you didn’t get hit with a befuddlement hex on the way to breakfast?” 

 

Gansey was used to Adam and Ronan bickering. Ronan could start an arguement with a stone wall if in a foul enough mood. But this bickering had a different flavor than just a few months ago, after whatever had gone down on Christmas break, and all they did was glare and glower and reply to each other with cutting sentences. This -- with Adam debating with the elated rigor he gave to his academic areas of interest, with the twitch at the corner of Ronan’s mouth that betrayed that he was pleased with the circumstances -- oh, yes, this, was something very different indeed.   

 

“I’ll hit you with a befuddlement hex right up the --” 

 

“You’re both wrong,” Noah said. Him saying anything definitive was still rare enough to shut them all up. “It’s not about who’s better. That’s not the point at all. It’s about balance. Different people who are good at different things, but are… what’s the word? Starts with a ‘c’?”

 

“Complimentary?” Gansey said. 

 

“Yes!” Noah said. “That’s it. Complimentary.” 

 

Complimentary, Gansey thought, like a ghost, a squib, and some weirdos. 

 

#

 

“I remembered something,” Noah said, appearing from nothing in the corridor outside of the Ravenclaw common room, at the bottom of the spiraling steps. “I wanted to tell you this morning, but I forgot. But I remembered again.”

 

Ever genial, Gansey said, “And what is that you wanted to tell me?”

 

Noah could ramble. He would start conversations and then disappear from them, show up twelve hours later to pick up where he left off. Gansey always humored him, and would even now, letting Noah drift down the hall beside him. 

 

“It’s about that guy,” Noah said. 

 

“Hmm?” Gansey checked his satchel for his quill. He had been forgetful lately, thinking about Blue and the exact shape of her lips instead of packing his bag properly. 

 

“That guy you’re always talking about,” Noah said. “What’s his name? 

 

There was only one guy that could be presumed to be someone Gansey talked about all the time. 

 

Gansey stopped digging in his bag. “Glendower?” 

 

“Yes.” Noah snapped his ghost-fingers and it resulted in zero noise. “Him. I’m remembering so many thing lately, but it’s all…” Noah shook his hands beside his head as if to suggest ‘mixed up.’

 

“What about Glendower?” Gansey asked. 

 

“I wish it would all stay in order and make sense, but --”   
  


“Noah.” Gansey ducked his head in an attempt to look Noah in the eyes. “What about Glendower?”

 

Noah’s brow furrowed. “Glendower? Right. Glendower. He has hidden treasure here at Hogwarts.”

 

The myth went that a descendant had buried something of his, but Gansey wasn’t going to argue semantics. Well, Gansey would argue semantics gladly, but not in these circumstances where keeping Noah on topic was paramount. 

 

“We were looking for it,” Noah said. “Me and Whelk. I thought it was just a good excuse to sneak out after hours. And… this is the secret.” Noah’s words turned sharply. “This is the secret Whelk killed me over. We found it.” 

 

Gansey’s heart seized. It was if someone had petrified him, except it came from the inside out. 

 

“You found it,” Gansey repeated. 

 

“In the place that’s only there when you want it to be,” Noah said wistfully. “Where all things are hidden.” 

 

“What? Where?” 

 

“It’s only there when you want it to be,” Noah said, then faded through the corridor wall where Gansey could not follow. 

 

#

 

“In the place that’s only there when you want it to be,” Gansey said. He chopped down the length of a dried mandrake root. “It’s  _ only _ there when you want it to be. It’s only there when you  _ want it to be _ ?” 

 

“What’re you muttering about?” Adam asked, returned from the supply cabinet with a bottle of fangs. 

 

Ganse shook his head. “Something Noah said.” He scooped up the chopped up root in his palms and dumped them in the cauldron, which was over a low, simmering flame. 

 

“He says a lot of things now.” Adam popped the cork on the bottle of fangs and started counting them out into a mortar. 

 

Gansey pressed his thumb to his temple, like he hoped he could press a thought into his head. 

 

“It was about Glendower,” Gansey admitted. The air in the potions classroom smelled earthy and burnt from the students work on the fairly tricky antidote to uncommon poisons. It was giving him a headache. 

 

“Is that selfish?” he said. “That he was murdered and I’m obsessing about Glendower?” 

 

“If you were anyone else,” Adam said. “I’d say yes. But you were sort of murdered yourself.” 

 

Gansey snorted. He didn’t snort. It wasn’t pleasant. But when you didn’t know what else to do, you laughed. Or pretended to do so. 

 

“He said -- Noah said that the reason Whelk killed him was because they had found Glendower’s hidden treasure.”

 

“Shit.” Adam hands stopped moving at the work they were doing -- grinding the fangs into a fine powder -- which was a true testament to his shock more than the swear. He was shocked enough to pause in his school work. 

 

“‘In the place that’s only there when you want it to be’,” Gansey repeated. He stirred the potion three times counterclockwise. “I swear I’ve heard that before. Does it ring a bell with you?”

 

A wrinkle formed between Adam’s eyebrows. “No. I don’t think so.” The wrinkle smoothed. “We could ask Ronan. I mean… I always feel like I’m playing catch up with the wizarding world.” 

 

The was the rare thing that Adam sometimes let slip, that he doubted himself and his place in the wizarding world down to his very core. 

 

“You know more about the wizarding world than probably anyone in this school,” Gansey said. 

 

“If you need me to write an essay, sure,” Adam said, the implication clear. Not for anything else. 

 

“Hey,” Gansey said, clapping a hand on Adam’s shoulder. “If you need somewhere to stay over summer break...” 

 

Adam rolled his shoulder to deflect Gansey’s hand off.  “I have somewhere to stay,” he said. 

 

Gansey nodded once. Adam’s tone didn’t invite continuation. 

 

Adam dumped the powder into the cauldron. “Stir that again, will you.”

 

# 

 

_ Dear Blue, _

 

_ I want to see you. I want to talk to you. I want to kiss you. I want to hold your hand. I want to look at your face.  _

 

_ I’m not particularly eloquent right now, but all I am is consumed with wants.  _

 

#

 

_ Dear Gansey, _

 

_ You can’t just write me letters like that. What makes you think I’m emotionally mature enough to deal with your wanting when I’m not emotionally mature enough to deal with my wanting. _

 

_ Thinking of you, but don’t let it go to your head.   _

 

_ xo _

_ Blue _

 

#

 

Careful with the creases, Gansey refolded Blue’s letter. It had come as a response just a few hours after he had sent his. There wasn’t much delay writing between the castle and Hogsmeade. It was a short owl’s flight. The only delay was ever the letter writers themselves, finding ways to transcribe their hearts. 

 

He tucked the letter into the front pocket of his shirt. It was just incidental that it was close to his heart.

 

He wasn’t sleeping tonight, no matter how many time he reread Blue’s letter. It wasn’t the type of letter that calmed his head anyway, but one that sped up his pulse instead. 

 

But anyway, what Noah had said this morning would keep him up all night. 

 

In the place that was only there when you wanted it to be.

 

Gansey had definitely heard that before. 

 

“Pulling another all-nighter there, Gansey-boy?” 

 

Henry Cheng had just stepped through the entrance way. It was past curfew, but the prefect badge pinned to the front of his robes gave him permission. Knowing Henry for a little less than the length of a school year, Gansey seriously doubted the mindset of whatever professor had decided to give him this promotion. It wasn’t that Henry wasn’t a passionate student, but mostly about the wrong things. Perhaps someone in charge admired his conviction, but Gansey knew for a fact that Henry regularly let wrongdoings slide if he disagreed with the rule they were based on, which was most of them. 

 

Gansey blinked up at Henry from his seat by the fire. Henry, with his tall spiky hair and his tooth smile and the glow of knowledge behind his eyes. It was in this very common room that they last had a private conversation, as strange as it had been. 

 

“You said it!” Gansey said, a burst out of words, meaningless without context. 

 

Henry cocked his head, unperturbed. 

 

“Said what? No offense, but I say a lot of things… Did I just say ‘no offense’ before offending myself?”

 

“You said something about a room that was… only there when you wanted it to be.” 

 

Gansey braced himself for a roadblock. For Henry to deny having said it. For Henry to admit saying it, but to say it had only be nonsense. 

 

Instead, Henry said, “Do you want to go see it?”

 

Shocked, Gansey couldn’t find any words. So what stumbled out of his mouth was, “It’s late.”

 

Henry jabbed a thumb at his prefect badge in response. “Also,” he added, turned right on heel, back to the entranceway. “What’s the worse thing they could do to our golden boy Gansey. Give him detention? Pe-shaw.”

 

As Gansey followed around a turn in the dark empty corridors into the depths of the dark empty castle, his chest constricted. While he didn’t find Henry, nor any of his classmates, particularly dangerous, wasn’t this how Noah died? Being alone with a supposed friend in an empty place. Wasn’t this how Gansey died, at a family party with trusted guests, and him wandering off into an empty hallway. A wayward spell hitting him in the chest. 

 

A light glared before Gansey’s eyes. He squeezed them shut, reopened them. It was a torch, in its bracket. Not a spell headed towards him.

 

He was safe here. He was safe here. He was safe here. He had been safe all year. Had almost managed a whole school year. He was stable now, like Helen said. 

 

When did the air get to thick? So hard to breath? 

 

And was the floor here sloping? Turning under his feet like the staircase that moved their places.

 

A hand landed on his arm, warm and solid. 

 

“Breath in slowly. Do it with me.” It was Henry’s voice in his ear. The sound of him sucking in breath. Gansey tried to imitate. He knew this was good advice, if only he could get his body to cooperate. 

 

Henry counted out to five slowly, then told him to breathe out. They followed this pattern through thrice, until Gansey felt back in control of himself to straighten up. 

 

Gansey pushed his glasses up his nose. “Sorry for freaking out,” he said. His heart wasn’t quite back at normal pace yet, but the floor was flat and steady under his feet again.

 

“Listen here, Mr. Richard Campbell Gansey the Third, you’re not the only one here who has had a panic attack.”

 

Henry said it lightly, like it wasn’t a stain on his consciousness. 

 

“We’re headed all they way over to the north wing,” Henry said. “Or did you want to go back to the common room?” 

 

“No,” Gansey said quick. “I don’t want to go back.” Richard Campbell Gansey the Third was done with retreating. 

 

So they walked on in side-by-side pace although Henry was really the one that was leading. 

 

“It’s strange, isn’t it,” Henry said, after a few minutes of recalibrating silence had passed between them, the most silence Gansey thought he had ever experienced in Henry’s full and loquacious presence. “That the bad things happen to you when your kid just… reshape your entire self. Well, not strange. Just… unfair.” 

 

Very on purpose, Gansey didn’t ask what happened to Henry, the why of the panic attacks and of the know how. Everyone knew what happened to Gansey. It was in books. It was dinner time conversation. He had never been given the gift of privacy. 

 

“Small, dark spaces,” Henry said. “That’s my thing. My -- what is it? -- trigger.” 

 

“Claustrophobia,” Gansey said, because it was saying something intelligent without saying anything meaningful. 

 

“Yup,” Henry agreed pleasantly. “Ah, here we are.” 

 

They had stopped in the middle of a corridor. On one side was a row of suits of armor, set up on pedestals. On the other was a solid stone wall. 

 

“Here we are?” Gansey questioned. 

 

“Don’t you know anything about Hogwarts? Nothing is what it seems.” 

 

“So I’ve been learning.” 

 

“Close your eyes,” Henry said. 

 

“Why?” Gansey said. 

 

“Just do it.” 

 

Gansey let his eyes shutter closer as his gut flipped over in distrust. His defenses were still sensitive.

 

“Now think about what you want,” Henry said, his voice near and far all at once, or perhaps that was the acoustics of the hallway, or Gansey’s own brain being dramatic. 

 

“Specifically, or…”

 

“Yes,” Henry said. “Specifically

 

Gansey wanted many things, but from this transaction what he was searching for was the place where Glendower’s treasure had been hidden, in the room that was only there when you wanted it to be. He wanted it to be. 

 

“Now open your eyes. I probably shouldn’t of had you close them in the first place. I need you to walk for this part.” 

 

“Walk where?” 

 

“Just back and forth a couple times.”

 

Gansey had a suspicion he was getting his chain tugged, but this would hardly be the most humiliating thing he’d done in pursuit of Glendower.

 

So he walked. “Like this?” he asked.

 

“A little further,” Henry said, standing off under the shadow of a suit of armor. Gansey had seen them move before, and if it were him, he wouldn’t stand so comfortable under one armed with an axe. “That’s good. Now turn around and walk back… And keep thinking about what you want!” 

 

Right. What he wanted. Gansey squeezed his eyes shut again, concentrating. He walked. He got partway down the hall, turned on spot, and walked again in the opposing direction. He did this once more. 

 

“Can I stop now?” 

 

“I don’t know,” Henry said, in a tone that suggested that he very well did know. “Open your eyes and look.” 

 

Gansey opened his eyes and looked. There, what had just moments ago been a blank stretch of stone wall, was now a door. 

 

“How --?” Magic, of course. But what kind of magic, and by what logic and rules. 

 

“It’s only there when you want it to be,” Henry said with glee. “But now I’m wondering what is going to be behind your door.”  

 

“Wouldn’t you know already?” Gansey asked. 

 

“Oh no, it’s different for everyone. That --” He pointed at the door. “My lad, is the legendary Room of Requirement. The one used in the Battle of Hogwarts. Everyone thought it was gone after because of some big magic fire that happened in it. But no. It just needed to… reset. And relocate.”

 

The door wasn’t that special seeming. Dark wood with brass fixings, like most of Hogwarts doors. Ancient and utilitarian.  

 

Was inside this door the end to his mystery? 

 

Is this how it would end, when he found the answer on accident, and he was dressed in his rumpled-from-the-day school uniform? It was hardly heroic, poetic, or anything of the related sort.

 

Gansey reached out and laid his hand upon the handle. This was it. Answers or disappointment. 

 

The door swung open, outward, easily. The hinges, like the door they were attached to, hadn’t been there moments before, but apparently they were well-fitted and well-oiled. 

 

The room beyond the door was long and deep. The only light was a beam of moonlight shining in through a skylight. Was the moon full tonight? Was it cloudy out? Was it at the correct angle in the sky for this? It didn’t matter in the Room of Requirement. The light needed was the light provided. 

 

The moonlight landed on a raised dais on the far end. And on the dias, a short pillar, like a place where something would be held. He squinted across the distance, but didn’t see anything. Perhaps it was small and hidden at this angle.  

 

Gansey glanced over his shoulder at Henry. 

 

“Impressive,” Henry said. “Never seen this one before.” 

 

Gansey nodded once, tight, and then proceeded inward. His feet echoed with every step in the otherwise perfect quiet. It was ominous. It was important.

 

He stepped up on the dias. He stared down at the top of the pillar, a table-like thing that was failing to do the table-like thing of holding something. Gansey ran his hand over the stone, on what was engraved and painted there: A yellow, two-legged dragon. Y Draig Aur. The Gold Dragon, the royal standard of Owain Glyndwr. 

 

But what else? What else was supposed to be in here? Where was the artifact that was hidden? Was it already gone? Had someone else already found it? 

 

When Gansey exited the room, the door dissolved behind him, no longer required. For now. 

 

Leaned by what was once the doorframe, Henry asked, “Find what you were looking for?” 

 

“Not exactly,” Gansey said. “Just another mystery.” 

 

“Ah,” Henry said. “And so is life.” 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I love Henry Cheng. Why don't I write more Henry Cheng? What is wrong with me?


	12. Everyone

Exam time. The peak of the mountain Adam had been climbing up all year. After the conclusion of each written exam, he left the room like he had planted his flag. Confidence ran through him with every sure answer he scribbled down. Year-long diligence let him reap the grades he had worked long sowing and tending. 

 

Naturally gifted and studious enough, Gansey went through the exams easily. 

 

For Ronan it was like pulling teeth. But the week leading up, he submitted to Gansey’s pushiness and crammed; he sat all of his exams. 

 

“Chill, Gansey. I only need to a pass a few to get to my NEWT levels,” he had said, about halfway through exam week.  Ronan, Adam realized, was confident enough in Care of Magical Creatures and Transfiguration, and could wing by with magical talent for charms and defense against the dark arts. He had no desire to be, didn’t need to be, the best in class, or even near the best, or even anywhere higher than scraping by with his family name and family money.  

 

Sometimes life was unfair, but the edges of unfairness were blunted when that unfairness worked in the favor of friends. Or whatever Ronan was to Adam.  

 

#

 

The balcony of the east tower was something different at the end of the school year, when the daylight hours stretched longer, and the air was warmer, and you could see straight over the shining lake to the peaks of the mountains. Against that view, Noah was a smudge. 

 

“You still hang out around here?” Ronan asked. He pressed his hands the railing. Was this the spot Noah had fallen?

 

“Where else would I hang out?” Noah said, the fog on the corner of Ronan’s vision. 

 

“I don’t know. Don’t you have a home?”

 

Maybe this was why Ronan came up here again, with no more mysteries to solve. He came up here for the old reason he had come here, to see his friend, to share his problems. 

 

Noah blinked. “I have a sister.”

 

Something twisted in Ronan’s gut. 

 

“I don’t think they’d be happy to see me,” Noah said. 

 

“They’re your fucking family,” Ronan said. Family. It had meant something -- everything -- to him once. 

 

“They don’t know I’m a ghost,” Noah said, his voice like the wind. “I haven’t seen them since… Since I was alive.”

Ronan didn’t say anything. 

 

“Being a ghost it’s… it’s not the same as being alive. It’s like being a shadow, or an echo. I’m not me, completely. I’m just…” His eyebrows lowered. “An impression.”

 

Like a melted puddle of what I once was, Ronan thought. 

 

“So it’s true what they fucking say,” Ronan said. “You can’t go home again, or some shit.” 

 

“Ronan,” Noah said, present as the ground Ronan stood on. “You’re alive. You can do anything you want.” 

  
#

 

It was roughly some time past noon and Blue laid in her bed, dressed, on top of the covers, sprawled diagonally. She wasn’t tired or ill, but if she tried to do anything but wallow at this moment she would combust. 

 

Summer break had come.  

 

A crueller person would take joy in the fact that this meant that the boys would no longer be seeing each other every day as she was left out. Blue didn’t feel this way. Not that she was highly enlightened. Blue was a sensible girl. She had been ascribed this trait all throughout her youth. She may have dressed outlandishly, but she worked a series of part time and temporary jobs, attended to her home school studies, and only ever dared to dream too big in private. 

 

Blue was sensible, meaning she understood the reality of summer break -- a three month stretch in which her friends would be cast to the wind, spread across the country, and not neatly next door, scheming plans for the next Hogsmeade trip. 

 

There were no Hogsmeade trips in exam month. Blue hadn’t even been able to say goodbye to them. She hadn’t seen Gansey since the morning after Noah’s confession, the morning after Gansey and she had shared their first kiss. And second. And third. 

 

Downstairs, someone knocked on the front door. Three evenly timed wraps, muffled by distance, then the three wraps repeated, faster. Someone must be desperate for their fortune to be told. 

 

A single set of footsteps creaked up the staircase. Not stompy enough to be Calla. Not clomping like Orla’s clogs. Too fast to be Jimi. Too easy to hear to be Persephone.

 

A knock on Blue’s bedroom door, and the culprit of the footsteps -- Maura -- called through. “Blue, you have company.”

 

Blue rose like a mummy from a sarcophagus. What possible company? The only company that would come calling for her was impossible, a concept of belief that made her chest ache, so she couldn’t let herself hope until she made it out of the bedroom and halfway down the stairs and could see for herself that her shaky faith had been rewarded.  

 

Below, standing in the entry hall, which was no more that a squat collection of space inside the front door between the living room and kitchen, an accident of engineering, stood her three Hogwarts boys. 

 

“How--?” she said, descending to the bottom of the stairs. Closer, she spied the beads of sweat trailing down Gansey’s forehead, Adam’s heaving chest, Ronan’s clothing in more disarray than usual.  

 

“We wanted to wish you a good summer, Blue,” Gansey said. “So we rushed down here before the carriages left.” 

 

Her entire life, Blue Sargent had felt out. No third eye. No magic. No Hogwarts. No true love. No friends. 

 

Some of those were still true, but others had to be scratched out of the record book. You were never really left out when the people that mattered remembered to include you. 

 

“One last chance to annoy you,” Ronan said. Blue pinched his arm, and he cuffed the back of her head in retaliation. It was only the dusting of a cuff, something a brother might do to a sister, more for show than vengeance. 

 

Adam she swallowed in a hug, this part familiar. 

 

“Don’t work too hard over summer,” he told her. 

 

“Oh, you know me. I’m slacker just like you,” she replied, which was her saying ‘you too.’

 

This left her with Gansey last. It was probably not an accident. He was the hardest one to know what to say to.

 

“Noah sends his love,” Gansey said as the two of them came to stand face to face. It was strange, doing this with company. 

 

“I send mine back,” Blue said. She didn’t blink. Gansey, frazzled, was a delectable sight. 

 

Behind Gansey, Adam grabbed Ronan by the sleeve. “Let’s go outside.” 

 

In the semi-private, because nothing in her house was truly private, Blue felt safe raising her hand to swipe away a strand of Gansey’s hair, damped down across his forehead. 

 

“Oh,” he said, raising a hand to touch the spot she had just touched. This was how precious their touches were, so rare. Distance and hearts and fondness and all of that. 

 

“I’ll come visit, over summer, if you’d like,” he said. 

 

“I’d like it,” she said. In Gansey’s presence, defenses down, it was so easy to accept. 

 

How was this so easy, when all of life leading up this had felt like fighting through an everlasting jinx. She almost thinked she was tricked. 

 

With with short-term privacy -- Maura had not come back down the steps for an astute reason -- Blue pressed up on her toes and planted an efficient kiss to Gansey’s mouth. Something to last them over the summer. 

 

#

 

“So,” Gansey drummed his fingers on his knees. “How are you feeling, Ronan?” 

 

In itself, it was an innocuous enough question, a greeting that could be passed on along with a short and meaningless answer. But it wasn’t innocuous. Gansey’s tone came loaded, kind of humid thick. They were alone, like the school year had started. Ronan and Gansey, in the train compartment, sitting across from each other in the window seats. It didn’t help that there was new knowledge, unspoken, hanging between them, ripe for prodding and avoidance. 

 

“Gansey,” Ronan said, growled. “Don’t.” 

 

“I let you not talk all year,” Gansey said. 

 

Ronan crossed arms tightened. Maybe he could turn into a statue right here, right now, and not have to do this. 

 

“I know what it’s like to need… space,” Gansey said. “To need it just so you can breath. Just so you can… hold yourself together.”

 

“What do you fucking want from me here?” Ronan said. Outside their compartment, a group of girls passed in bursting laughter. 

 

“You know it already,” Ronan said. “You know the truth.” 

 

Gansey also knew, from observed experience, the evidence of that truth. He said seen first hand the destruction that had been done to the Lynch family, and the destruction that had been done to Ronan himself. What more words could be put to -- “I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m broken” -- than how Ronan acted and reacted and sliced through every day of living since. 

 

Gansey rubbed at his temple, and said, “I know you can only do it alone for so long.”  

 

Ronan drew in a breath. The train ricketed on. 

 

“Gansey,” he said. “I’m not alone.” It was a bigger thing to say than it sounded like, but it was true. Gansey, Noah, Adam, and even Blue. Ronan was less alone than he had been a long time. After dad, after mom, after the sanctity of brothers combusted, Ronan hadn’t thought he could of ever allowed some much room for people in his chest again.  

 

“Alright,” Gansey said, understanding at least enough. He was one of the better people at translating Ronan. “Just don’t forget it.” He held out a fist across the distance between their knees for Ronan to bump; Ronan did. 

 

#

 

Here was the thing about being Henry Cheng... he was so much more than what people saw, what people heard, what people knew. 

 

They all thought they saw, and heard, and knew, because Henry went out of his way to make himself seen, and heard, and known. But as anyone would know, you can say a lot, and loudly, and not be saying much anything at all.

 

“Cheng,” someone said as they walked by him in the train, patting him on the shoulder as he passed. Distracted, Henry only made out some vague details -- yellow and black tie, not who he was looking for -- and nodded in similar, fleeting greeting. 

 

In his pocket was tucked the latest letter from his mother, only arrived yesterday, detailing who of her trusted associates exactly would be picking him up from the train station. It was in thin-inked hangul, the work of the deft, precise hand. His mother’s hand herself, not dictated, relegated, or magicked.  

 

He went to school far away from home. Supposedly because Hogwarts was the best. Supposedly because Hogwarts was the safest. Supposedly because the ‘far away from home’ part would put him farther out of the reach of his mother’s enemies. 

 

Also, because it put Henry in a strategic position. There were the children of a lot of powerful and interesting people who went to Hogwarts. Even though some of said interesting people were now deceased. 

 

A boy, sticking up tall over the rest of the students, buzz cut, red and gold tie hanging loose and limp with disdain under his collar, stepped out of a compartment. Ronan Lynch.

 

He brushed past Henry without a consideration or excuse me. Henry picked a piece of lint off of his sleeve, checked over his shoulder that Lynch was far gone on his way, then started forward. 

 

He paused outside the compartment Ronan had just exited, and inside was exactly who he was looking for. For where Ronan Lynch was, Richard Campell Gansey III was not far. 

 

Henry wrapped on the compartment door to get his attention. Gansey was at the window seat, facing the back of the train, so he was looking from where they had come from. At the knock he looked up and then, seeing Henry, waved him in. 

 

Henry Cheng could be accused of coming on too strong, but he knew what he was doing when it counted. Lay the groundwork and let people meet you halfway. 

 

“How’s it fairing?” Henry said as he plopped down on the seat across Gansey. 

 

“I’m well,” Gansey said, all manners. His nostrils flared as he took in a long breath. “Actually… all I can think about is how I already miss it.” 

 

“Hogwarts? Or the girl who lives next door?” 

 

“...Both.” 

 

The train rocked over a bump in the track. Henry shifted forward in his seat. 

 

“I have to admit something,” he said, “about you.” It was the type of sentence that got you all the attention of the person you were with, Gansey being no exception. “I’ve been curious about you since you first stepped into our humble little school. Although, I suppose everyone was, of course.”

 

“Of course,” Gansey repeated, measured. 

 

“But not like everyone else, though. Not really. I wasn’t going to ask you to tell the story like it was some party trick, or ask you what it was like to die.” Henry folded his hands tight over his knees to control their slight, telling tremble. 

 

“See,” Henry said. “I already know what it’s like to die.” The muscles of his face felt tight, as if they were resisting. As if they were trying to tell him: stop telling the truth, stop making yourself remember.

 

Gansey eyes flicked across Henry’s face, looking for some tell, for some lie, for some explanation. 

 

“It’s just darkness,” Henry said. “And nothingness. Unstopping.” 

 

“Henry --”

 

“I was kidnapped. When I was eight. For ransom.” He rubbed a spot behind his ear. He felt itchy. “The place they kept me…”

 

“You’re afraid of small, dark spaces.”

 

Henry ticked a finger in Gansey’s direction. “See. I knew you’d get me.” 

 

The train barrelled onward. One or the other or both of Gansey’s velcro friends would surely be returning soon. And what else was there to say. Henry had said it, and Gansey had understood. It was a rare occasion for Henry Cheng, in all this attempts, to actually be seen, and heard, and understood. 

 

He stood. “See you next year?” he asked. It was a genuine question. He had heard the rumors of Gansey’s educational background.

 

Gansey offered a hand for a shake. “Next year.” 

 

#

 

Adam’s fingers buzzed with an energy, familiar and urgent, psychic power at work. He shook them out. 

 

Flip the card, he demanded at them in thought. Flip the card, he thought again. It doesn’t matter that it feels like electrostatic under them, and that you’re a little anxious, and a little scared. Just flip. 

 

He flipped. 

 

Lovers. 

 

Merlin dammit. 

 

“So this is where your fucking hiding.” 

 

Adam lifted his head. He was in an empty compartment at the very end of the train. He had been sitting with his friends, had got up to, ostensibly, go to the restroom, but ended up here. Alone. An itch had overwhelmed and he had needed some privacy to do a tarot reading. 

 

Ronan Lynch stood in the doorway. So consumed, Adam hadn’t even heard the compartment door slide open on its rickety track. 

 

Adam flipped the Lovers card back over, hiding it’s face, as Ronan stepped inside and drew the door shut.

 

Ronan plopped himself beside Adam on the bench. His cards were spread on the bench seat across from them with Adam hunched over to reach them. 

 

“Doing your weird divination stuff?” 

 

“If you think it’s so weird, you can leave,” Adam replied, but didn’t mean it. 

 

He left Lovers were it was, and ran his thumb over the edge of the deck. 

 

“Gansey said he offered to have you stay with him over the summer. He said you said no.” 

 

“I don’t want to talk about this,” Adam said. Under his unwavering stare, Ten of Cups and it’s rainbow blurred. 

 

“I’m sure Sargent’s already offered too.” 

 

“Lynch,” Adam said, as sharp as the word could be made. “It’s my life. I’m going to get out of their on my own, and not with anyone’s charity.”

 

He heard Ronan scoff. “Fucking stubborn ass Slytherin. Don’t you know bull-headedness is supposed to be a Gryffindor trait?” Their knees bumped. 

 

“I thought Gryffindor traits were being reckless and brash,” Adam said, turning his head too look at him. Ronan was looking right back. They were awfully close. 

 

“You think I’m reckless?” Ronan countered. 

 

“I --” He was at a loss for words. 

 

Ronan leaned forward and kissed him. Mouth against mouth. The need for breathing gone.  

 

It was like someone had scooped Adam up and thrown him into the Great Lake: a complete lose of gravity and then he was surrounded. And Adam didn’t know how to swim. 

 

Ronan hand came up and wrapped around the back of his neck: a gentle, holding, pulling touch. 

 

Adam leaned in, kissed back. He didn’t mind drowning. 

#

 

Noah stood on the balcony, looking down. 

 

The school felt different when it was empty, with all the energy of the swarming students gone. Each year passed liked the ebb and flow of the tide. 

 

Below him, at the base of the tower, stretched out the lake. The water pulled and shifted, a mysterious thing filled with mysterious things. 

 

It was the impact of the fall that killed him, as far as Noah understood it. And as far as he understood it, it was the merpeople who had returned his body to the school, too late for anything to be done but a proper burial. 

 

He wasn’t fully formed back then. He had been too scared to move on, not ready for death, not realizing it was happening as it was happening, so his consciousness tugged free, and he existed, knowing, observing, confused, but not yet in the corporeal form of the ghost other wizards could see. 

 

Noah raised his hands and set them upon his own chest. The only thing that felt solid under his fingers was himself: the texture of the wool of his robes, the smooth threads on the embroidered Hogwarts chest, buttons and button holes. He wore the same things now as when he had died. 

 

All except one thing. 

 

Noah ran his hand over his shoulder, where the dragon-hide strap should be. His school satchel was missing. When he had died, he had been wearing it; he had something in it he had wanted to show that girl that he thought he was meeting, something to impress her. The satchel must’ve fallen off of his as he had fallen. Fallen and sunk in the lake, unreturned, before the exact moment of Noah’s death. 

 

They had found the treasure, Whelk and Noah. They had found Glendower’s hidden treasure. It was the best and most important of treasure of a lost king: his crown. 

 

Noah had forgotten another essential part in his retelling, never told this part. It didn’t matter where they had found it. Gansey wouldn’t find it in the room that changed into what you want it to be, when you wanted it to be there. The treasure was gone. Noah had taken it. It was just the right size to slip into his satchel, carry undetected for a night. 

 

He had planned to put it back. But the girl…

 

He couldn’t remember her name. Why couldn’t he even remember her name? He had died for a chance night alone with her. He had lost Glendower’s treasure in a strange hope that it might impress herl. Whelk hadn’t known. They had agreed to leave it in that secret room, where it was safeguarded from everyone else but them, until they could figure out what to do with it, how to use it. 

 

No one had known. 

 

This has the secret only Noah knew: the same night Noah’s life had been lost, so had Glendower’s crown, somewhere in the depths of the Great Lake, had been lost as well. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'll admit, there was a point about chapter 4/5 that I didn't think I'd be able to pull this whole story together and finish it. Thankfully, I got some thoughtful comments at the time that inspired me to keep going. I'm glad I did. This was a fun, learning writing experience. 
> 
> To answer the question that probably some of you are primed to write in the comments: Is there going to be a sequel? Am I going to do 7th year? 
> 
> The answers: Perhaps. A few chapter before the end of this I had to think about what I wanted to do... rush to resolve everything, extend this fic into year 7, or something? I decided to resolve this story in a way that felt true to the arcs I had been exploring, but leave enough fertile ground to potentially do more in the future. 
> 
> In other notes... hit me up at ungoodgatsby.tumblr.com and also maybe check out my new pynch story. Thanks!
> 
> Also, was that pych slowburn enough? The first kiss in the second to last scene, lol.

**Author's Note:**

> Find me on tumblr at ungoodgatsby.tumblr.com


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